A Grammar of Mian
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Sebastian Fedden
About this book
Winner of the 2013 ALT Gabelentz Award
Mian is a non-Austronesian ('Papuan') language of the Ok family spoken in the Highlands fringe in western Papua New Guinea. Mian has approximately 1,400 speakers and is highly endangered. This grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on primary field data consisting of a text corpus that covers different genres of the oral tradition, namely myths and ancestor stories, historical accounts, accounts of the initiation ritual, conversations, and procedural texts. The corpus was recorded by the author during a total of eleven months of field work from 2004 to 2008. The book provides a thorough description of all areas of Mian grammar and gives an in-depth analysis of many points of typological interest, such as the complex system of lexical tone, the interaction between a gender system and a system of classificatory prefixes on verbs of object movement, manipulation or handling, which allows the highlighting of certain characteristics of a referent in a given situation, the complex verbal morphology which allows fine-grained tense-aspect-mood distinctions, and a switch-reference system in which switch-reference suffixes on medial verbs are homophonous with and derived from suffixes functioning as tense and aspect markers in final verbs. The book is rounded off by a collection of traditional and contemporary texts (fully glossed and translated) and a word list comprising some 1,600 items, giving lexical tone, word class and meaning.
Author / Editor information
Sebastian Fedden, University of Surrey, Great Britain.
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Acknowledgements
V -
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Table of contents
IX -
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Abbreviations
XXIII -
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Chapter 1. The language and its speakers
1 -
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Chapter 2. Phonology
19 -
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Chapter 3. Word classes and grammatical relations
85 -
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Chapter 4. Gender
169 -
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Chapter 5. Classificatory verb prefixes
185 -
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Chapter 6. The noun phrase
203 -
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Chapter 7. The postpositional phrase
233 -
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Chapter 8. Verb morphology
243 -
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Chapter 9. Argument structure and the syntax of the clause
331 -
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Chapter 10. Question formation
385 -
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Chapter 11. Chaining constructions
405 -
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Chapter 12. Operator scope in clause chaining constructions
471 -
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Chapter 13. Embedding
485 -
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Appendix I. Texts
515 -
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Appendix II. Mian-English wordlist
545 -
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Notes
579 -
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References
585 -
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Index
597
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