Author : Lana Grelyn Takau
Publisher : Asia-Pacific Linguistics
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,3 MB
Release : 2023-08-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781760465551
Nese is a dying Oceanic language spoken on the island of Malekula, in northern Vanuatu. This book, based on first-hand fieldwork data, and without adhering to any particular syntactic framework, presents a synchronic grammatical description of Nese's phonology and syntax. Despite being on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 20 living speakers, the language displays intriguing properties--including but not exclusive to the cross-linguistically rare apicolabial phonemes, interesting vowel-raising patterns in some word classes, and a discontinuous negation relationship that is obligatorily expressed with the irrealis mood marker. This book will probably be the last work published on Nese.