The Palauan reference grammar offers a comprehensive description of the language that will interest speakers of Palauan and linguists alike. Although the linguistic phenomena of Palauan are often extremely complex, special efforts have been made to keep explanations as simple and clear as possible while capturing the essential phonological and grammatical principles unique to the language. Learning is facilitated by extensive cross-referencing, a list of phonetic and orthographic symbols, a glossary of relevant linguistic terms, a brief bibliography, and an index. Material is presented in order of difficulty, with an analysis at each stage. Some information of a highly technical nature is also included for readers with a background in linguistics.

This monograph constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of reciprocal constructions and related phenomena in the world’s languages. Reciprocal constructions (of the type The two boys hit each other, The poets admire each other’s poems) have often been the subject of language-particular studies, but it is only in this work that a truly global comparative picture emerges. Nine stage-setting chapters dealing with general and theoretical matters are followed by 40 chapters containing in-depth descriptions of reciprocals in individual languages by renowned specialists. The introductory papers provide a conceptual and terminological framework that allows the authors of the individual chapters to characterize their languages in comparable terms, making it easy for the reader to see points of commonality between languages and constructions that have never been compared before. This set of volumes is an indispensable starting point and will be a lasting reference work for any future studies of reciprocals.

Based on the Palauan-English dictionary by Fr. Edwin G. McManus, S.J. (UH Press, 1977), this revision is designed to be an easily accessible reference for identifying vocabulary items of Palauan, which are often culture bound, semantically rich, and structurally quite complex. Thousands of Palauan entries are new or greatly expanded. Users will benefit from a much wider range of vocabulary, especially in the areas of flora and fauna, Palauan legend, and borrowed words from both English and Japanese. The expanded English-Palauan finder list allows for quick reference to the Palauan equivalents of many English words.