A Grammar of South Efate: An Oceanic Language of VanuatuThis book presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of PortVila. It is one of the first such grammars to take seriously the provision of primary data for the verification of claims made in the analysis. The research is set in the context of increasing attention being paid to the state of the world’s smaller languages and their prospects for being spoken into the future. In addition to providing an outline of the grammar of the language, the author describes the process of developing an archivable textual corpus that is used to make example sentences citable and playable, using software (Audiamus) developed in the course of the research. An included DVD provides a dictionary and finderlist, a set of interlinearized example texts and elicited sentences, and playable media versions of most example sentences and of the example texts. |
Contents
1 Introduction | 1 |
2 South Efate place people and language | 12 |
3 Phonology | 45 |
4 Word classes | 74 |
5 Nominals and the noun phrase | 103 |
6 Mood and aspect | 149 |
7 Verbs and verb classes | 171 |
8 Valency changing processes | 196 |
10 The verb complex | 243 |
11 Simple sentences | 267 |
12 Complex sentences | 290 |
AppendixTexts in South Efate | 331 |
Attachment DVD notes | 367 |
| 368 | |
| 381 | |
9 Verb combinations | 221 |
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Common terms and phrases
3sgo 3sgRS acting adjectives appear auxiliary verbs Bislama called chief child clause COMP complement complex compound consonant constructions Crowley derived direct discussed distinguish encoded Erakor event example expressed father function further give given head indicate intransitive intransitive verbs irrealis island Kaltog language lexical look marker marking meaning modifiers NEG2 nominal notes nouns object occur okay p.name particle person phrase position possessive pre-verbal preceding predicates prefix preg PREP preposition present pronominal pronouns realis recorded reference seen sentence shows South Efate speaker stay stem story subject proclitic suffix syllable Table talk tell tesa tete texts transitive transitive suffix transitivizing turn types typically Vanuatu verb verb stems village vowel woman