The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor and Research Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics) in the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew (1990; second edition 2009). She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages.Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002) and Evidentiality (2004, paperback 2006), all published by OUP. She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology, the fifth volume of which, The Semantics of Clause Linking, appeared in 2009.

to call it merely a "grammar" does not do justice to the extraordinary accomplishment and intellectual richness represented by this book. In so many ways, Aikhenvald's book qualifies as a model of what linguists with modern sensitivities should be aiming for when setting out to write a grammar of an indigenous language based on fieldwork ... In summary, Aikhenvald's grammar of Manambu is a sheer tour de force, not just on account of the thoroughness of the grammatical description and analysis, but equally on account of the depth of the engagement of the researcher with the speakers and the community as reflected throughout the book.

• 1. Introduction. The Language, and its Speakers ; 2. Phonology ; 3. Grammatical Relations ; 4. Word Classes ; 5. Gender Marking, Semantics, and Agreement ; 6. Number ; 7. Case Marking ; 8. Possession ; 9. Derivation and Compounding ; 10. Closed Classes ; 11. Predicate Structure and Verb Root Types ; 12. Verbal Categories in Positive Declarative and Interrogative Clauses ; 13. Mood and Modality ; 14. Negation ; 15. Verb Compounding ; 16. Directionals and Valency-Changing Devices ; 17. Complex Predicates ; 18. Clause Linking and Dependent Clauses ; 19. Other Dependent Clauses and Further Features of Clause Linking ; 20. Clause Types and Discourse-Pragmatic Devices ; 21. Issues in Semantics and Features of Lexicon ; 22. Genetic and Areal Relationships, and New Developments in the Language ; Texts ; Vocabulary ; List of Affixes ; References ; Index of Authors, Languages, and Subjects