Description
Book SynopsisA Grammar of Nungon is the most comprehensive modern reference grammar of a language of northeast Papua New Guinea. Nungon is a previously-undescribed Finisterre-Huon Papuan language spoken by about 1,000 people in the Saruwaged Mountains, Morobe Province. Hannah Sarvasy provides a rich description of the language in its cultural context, based on original immersion fieldwork. The exposition is extraordinarily thorough, covering phonetics, phonology, word classes, morphology, grammatical relations, switch-reference, valency, complex predicates, clause combining, possession, information structure, and the pragmatics of communication. Four complete interlinearized Nungon monologues and dialogues supplement the copious textual examples. A Grammar of Nungon sets a new standard of thoroughness for reference works on languages of this region.
Trade Review"My minor critical comments and tentative alternative proposals do not diminish in any way my great admiration for this grammar, which forms an exemplary model and sets a high standard for future grammarians of New Guinea languages. Precisely because the exposition is so clear and the description so rich, the book both allows and invites the reader to participate in the scholarly conversation about Nungon, so brilliantly started by Hannah Sarvasy in this book." – Lourens de Vries, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in: Oceanic Linguistics, 2018
