Constructions with multiple verbal elements have posed a long-standing challenge to linguistic analysis. Most studies of verb serialisation have been confined to single languages rather than looking at crosslinguistic patterns. This book provides the first in-depth account into the areal characteristics of multi-verb constructions (MVCs) in Eastern Indonesia. By collating published data as well as corpus data from 32 Austronesian and Papuan languages, the study traces commonalities as well as differences in MVC use across the area. Analysis takes place on two levels: first, the morpho-syntactic behaviour of MVCs is taken into account. As this plane of analysis arguably does not provide any meaningful insights into why MVCs are construed and used the way they are, a semantic account of MVCs is presented. One of the main hypotheses advanced in this book is that the crucial driving force behind multi-verb construals is semantic interaction between the verbs, leading to four principal techniques of event formation: merging, staging, modification, and free juxtaposition. The study aims at showing that while all four techniques are, to varying degrees, in use in Eastern Indonesian languages, the morpho-syntactic output does not necessarily mirror these underlying differences in event conception. Applying insights from Davidsonian event semantics as well as from predicate decomposition, the book provides a model of event interaction that helps to explain differences in MVC behaviour such as issues in constituent order or operator assignment.

This volume is the first book-length presentation of the grammatical category of Associated Motion. It provides a framework for understanding a grammatical phenomenon which, though present in many languages, has gone unrecognized until recently. Previously known primarily from languages of Australia and South America, grammatical AM marking has now been identified in languages from most parts of the world (except Europe) and is becoming an important topic in linguistic typology. The chapters provide a thorough introduction to the subject, discussion of the relation between AM and related grammatical concepts, detailed descriptions of AM in a wide range of the world’s languages, and surveys of AM in particular language families and areas.

This is a comprehensive grammar of the Papuan language Bunaq as spoken in the district of Lamaknen. Bunaq belongs to the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family, which comprises the westernmost Papuan languages. Surrounded on all sides by Austronesian languages, Bunaq has developed in isolation from other members of the family, and as a result shows a range of unique morphosyntactic patterns. This grammar provides a detailed synchronic description of Bunaq based on a functional-typological approach. Following additional fieldwork and containing new material and analyses, this book is a thoroughly revised version of the author’s 2010 PhD thesis, which won the Pāṇini Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology.

This volume investigates the linguistic expression of directed caused accompanied motion events, including verbal concepts like BRING and TAKE. Contributions explore how speakers conceptualise and describe these events across areally, genetically, and typologically diverse languages of the Americas, Austronesia and Papua. The chapters investigate such events on the basis of spoken language corpora of endangered, underdescribed languages and in this way the volume showcases the importance of documentary linguistics for linguistic typology. The semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion shows considerable crosslinguistic variation in how meaning components are conflated within single lexemes or distributed across morphemes or clauses. The volume presents a typology of common patterns and constraints in the linguistic expression of these events. The study of crosslinguistic event encoding provided in this volume contributes to our understanding of the nature, extent and limits of linguistic and cognitive diversity.

This book is a grammar of Kalamang, a Papuan language of western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 130 people in the villages Mas and Antalisa on the biggest of the Karas Islands, which lie just off the coast of Bomberai Peninsula. This work is the first comprehensive grammar of a Papuan language in the Bomberai area. It is based on eleven months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a corpus of more than 15 hours of spoken Kalamang recorded and transcribed between 2015 and 2019. This grammar covers a wide range of topics beyond a phonological and morphosyntactic description, including prosody, narrative styles, and information structure. More than 1000 examples illustrate the analyses, and are where possible taken from naturalistic spoken Kalamang. The descriptive approach in this grammar is informed by current linguistic theory, but is not driven by any specific school of thought. Comparison to other West Bomberai or eastern Indonesian languages is taken into account whenever it is deemed helpful. Kalamang has several typologically interesting features, such as unpredictable stress, minimalistic give-constructions consisting of just two pronouns, aspectual markers that follow the subject, and the NP and predicate – rather than the noun and verb – as important domains of attachment. This grammar is accompanied by an openly accessible archive of linguistic and cultural material and a dictionary with 2700 lemmas. It serves as a document of one of the world's many endangered languages.

In grammar design, a basic distinction is made between derivational and modular architectures. This raises the question of which organization of grammar can deal with linguistic phenomena more appropriately. The studies contained in the present volume explore the interface relations between different levels of linguistic representation in Functional Discourse Grammar as presented in Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008) and Keizer (2015). This theory analyses linguistic expressions at four linguistic levels: interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological. The articles address issues such as the possible correspondences and mismatches between those levels as well as the conditions which constrain the combinations of levels in well-formed expressions. Additionally, the theory is tested by examining various grammatical phenomena with a focus both on the English language and on typological adequacy: anaphora, raising, phonological reduction, noun incorporation, reflexives and reciprocals, serial verbs, the passive voice, time measurement constructions, coordination, nominal modification, and connectives. Overall, the volume provides both theoretical and descriptive insights which are of relevance to linguistics in general.