The people who live in the Boumaa region of the Fijian island of Taveuni speak a dialect of Fijian that is mutually intelligible with Standard Fijian, the two differing as much perhaps as do the American and British varieties of English. During 1985, R. M. W. Dixon—one of the most insightful of linguists engaged in descriptive studies today—lived in the village of Waitabu and studied the language spoken there. He found in Boumaa Fijian a wealth of striking features unknown in commonly studied languages and on the basis of his fieldwork prepared this grammar. Fijian is an agglutinating language, one in which words are formed by the profligate combining of morphemes. There are no case inflections, and tense and aspect as shown by independent clitics or words within a predicate complex. Most verbs come in both transitive and intransitive forms, and nouns can be build up regularly from verbal parts and verbs from nouns. The language is also marked by a highly developed pronoun system and by a vocabulary rich in areas of social significance. In the opening chapters, Dixon describes the Islands' political, social, and linguistic organization, outlines the main points of Fijian phonology, and presents an overview of the grammar. In succeeding chapters, he examines a number of grammatical topics in greater detail, including clause and phrase structure, verbal syntax, deictics, and anaphora. The volume also includes a full vocabulary of all forms treated in discussion and three of the fifteen texts recorded from monolingual village elders on which the grammar is based.

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This 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.

This is the first comprehensive description of Paluai, an Oceanic Austronesian language spoken on Baluan Island in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive field research, the grammar covers all linguistic levels, including phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, while paying particular attention to pragmatics and discourse practices. This is the first comprehensive description of Paluai, a language from the underdescribed Admiralties subgroup, a first-order branch of Oceanic (Austronesian). Paluai is spoken on Baluan Island in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, by two to three thousand people. The grammar is based on extensive field research by the author and covers all linguistic levels. After a general introduction of its socio-cultural context, the language's phonology is discussed, followed by two chapters on its parts of speech, divided by open and closed word classes. Following chapters address topics such as the structure of the noun phrase, verbal and non-verbal clauses, grammatical relations, serial verb constructions, mood, negation and clause combining. The final chapter provides an in-depth discussion of pragmatics and discourse practices relevant to Paluai, illustrated through two narrative texts that are included integrally at the end of the book. This grammar is of interest to scholars working on Austronesian languages, particularly those of the New Guinea region, and those working on linguistic typology. It is also relevant to those interested in the history, languages and cultures of this region more generally.

Spoken on Mavea Island by approximately 32 people, Mavea is an endangered Oceanic language of Vanuatu. This work provides grammatical descriptions of this hitherto undescribed language. Fourteen chapters, containing more than 1,400 examples, cover topics in the phonology and morphosyntax of Mavea, with an emphasis on the latter. Of particular interest are examples of individual speaker variation presented throughout the grammar; the presence of three linguo-labials (still used today by a single speaker) that were unexpectedly found before the rounded vowel /o/; and a chapter on numerals and the counting system, which have long been replaced by Bislama’s but are remembered by a handful of speakers. Most of the grammatical descriptions derive from a corpus of texts of various genres (conversations, traditional stories, personal histories, etc.) gathered during the author’s fieldwork, conducted for eleven months between 2005 and 2007.

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Living in a reed hut on Taveuni--the "garden isle" of Fiji--the author studied the native language and carefully observed their traditions until he was accepted as a (somewhat unusual) member of the village. Despite five cyclones the summer of 1985, daily life was idyllic. Cannibalism has been abandoned, reluctantly, at the behest of the new Christian God. But the old religion survived beneath the facade and priests danced naked on the beach beneath the full moon. The village pulsated with factions and feuds, resolved by the stern but benevolent chief, whose word was law. Legends told of a princess born as a bird, who was killed and thus became a comely maiden--but the murderer had to be cooked and eaten.