A Sketch Grammar of Pondi

Description

This book provides the first grammatical description of Pondi, a severely endangered language spoken by fewer than 300 people, almost all of whom live in a single village in the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. Pondi is a non-Austronesian (i.e. Papuan) language, belonging to the Ulmapo branch of the Keram family. A Sketch Grammar of Pondi includes ethnographic information, with ample discussion of language vitality and endangerment. The grammatical description begins with phonetics and phonology, before turning to major and minor word classes. The description of nominal morphology focuses especially on Pondi’s irregular number affixation and stem alternation, while the description of verbal morphology is largely concerned with aspect and mood suffixation. Syntax is discussed both at the level of the phrase and at the level of the clause. Topics in syntax, such as questions, commands, negation and conditionals are discussed. Following the grammatical description, there is a lexicon of over 600 Pondi words, presented both as a Pondi-to-English word list and as an English-to-Pondi finder list. Acknowledgements List of abbreviations List of maps, figures and tables 1. Introduction 1.1 Organisation 1.2 Previous research on the language 1.3 Methodology 1.4 Orthography and presentation 1.5 Pondi: The language and its speakers 1.5.1 The name of the language 1.5.2 The environment 1.5.3 Langam village 1.5.4 The people 1.5.5 Relationships with neighbouring villages and borrowing 1.5.6 Variation 1.6 Language vitality 1.6.1 UNESCO’s nine factors 1.6.2 EGIDS 1.6.3 LEI 1.7 Classification 1.8 Typological overview 2. Phonetics and phonology 2.1 Consonants 2.1.1 Voiceless stops 2.1.2 Prenasalised voiced stops 2.1.3 Prenasalised voiced affricate 2.1.4 Nasals 2.1.5 Liquid 2.1.6 Fricative 2.1.7 Glides 2.2 Vowels 2.2.1 The high front unrounded vowel /i/ 2.2.2 The mid front unrounded vowel /e/ 2.2.3 The low central unrounded vowel /a/ 2.2.4 The mid back rounded vowel /o/ 2.2.5 The high back rounded vowel /u/ 2.2.6 The high central unrounded vowel /ɨ/ 2.2.7 Diphthongs 2.3 Syllable structure 2.4 Stress 2.5 Morphophonemic processes 2.5.1 Vowel coalescence 2.5.2 Glide formation 2.5.3 Vowel degemination (or shortening) 2.5.4 High central vowel deletion 2.5.5 High vowel gliding 2.5.6 Glide insertion 2.5.7 Monophthongisation 2.5.8 Degemination and quasi-degemination 2.5.9 Sibilant voicing 2.6 Metathesis 2.7 Lexically determined alternations 3. Nominal morphology (number) 3.1 Plurals ending in -al 3.2 Plurals ending in -ïl 3.3 Plurals ending in -e 3.4 Plurals ending in -se 3.5 Plurals ending in -ate 3.6 Plurals ending in -ange 3.7 Plurals ending in -une 3.8 Non-plural -mo, plural -me 3.9 Plural ending in -mbe 3.10 Non-plurals ending in -m (singulative suffix) 3.11 Suppletive forms 3.12 Additional remarks on nominal number 4. Verbal morphology 4.1 Basic verbal morphology 4.2 The imperfective aspect 4.3 The perfective aspect 4.4 The irrealis mood 4.5 The imperative mood 4.6 The perfect prefix a- 4.7 The detransitiviser prefix l- 4.8 Nonfinite verb forms 4.9 The simultaneous suffix -e 4.10 The conditional suffix -se 4.11 The locative verb p- ‘be (at)’ 4.12 The motion verbs i- ‘come’ and mal- ‘go’ 5. Other word classes 5.1 Adjectives 5.1.1 Adjectival number morphology 5.1.2 The derivational suffix -wï ‘-like’ 5.2 Pronouns 5.2.1 Personal pronouns 5.2.2 Reflexive/reciprocal pronouns 5.2.3 Possessive pronouns 5.2.4 Intensive pronouns 5.2.5 Indefinite/interrogative pronouns 5.3 Determiners 5.3.1 Deictic demonstratives 5.3.2 Subject markers and object markers 5.3.3 Quantifiers 5.4 Postpositions 5.5 Adverbs 5.5.1 Temporal adverbs 5.5.2 Locative adverbs 5.5.3 Other adverbs 5.6 Negators 5.7 Interrogative words 5.8 Conjunctions 5.9 Numerals 6. Phrase-level syntax 6.1 Noun phrases 6.1.1 Nominal number 6.1.2 Possession 6.2 Verb phrases 6.2.1 Auxiliary verbs 6.2.2 Compound verbs 6.2.3 Equational constructions 6.3 Adpositional phrases 7. Clause-level syntax 7.1 Basic constituent order 7.2 Core argument alignment 7.3 Obliques 7.4 Ditransitive alignment? 7.5 Monoclausal (or simple) sentences 8. The syntax of sentences 8.1 Complex sentences 8.1.1 Coordination 8.1.2 The functional equivalent of relative clauses 8.1.3 Permissive constructions 8.1.4 Subordination 8.1.5 Simultaneous action 8.1.6 Parataxis 8.2 Questions 8.3 Commands and requests 8.4 Negation 8.5 Reported speech 8.6 Conditional sentences 9. Lexicon 9.1 Pondi-to-English word list 9.2 English-to-Pondi finder list Swadesh 100-word list Swadesh 200-word list Standard SIL–PNG word list (190 items) References