![A grammar of Komnzo](https://mds.marshall.edu/oa-textbooks/1574/thumbnail.jpg)
Title
A grammar of Komnzo
Files
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Contributors
Christian Döhler - Author
Copyright Year
2018
Description
Komnzo is a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea spoken by around 250 people in the village of Rouku. Komnzo belongs to the Tonda subgroup of the Yam language family/ which is also known as the Morehead Upper-Maro group. This grammar provides the first comprehensive description of a Yam language. It is based on 16 months of fieldwork. The primary source of data is a text corpus of around 12 hours recorded and transcribed between 2010 and 2015. Komnzo provides many fields of future research/ but the most interesting aspect of its structure lies in the verb morphology/ to which the two largest chapters of the grammar are dedicated. Komnzo verbs may index up to two arguments showing agreement in person/ number and gender. Verbs encode 18 TAM categories/ valency/ directionality and deictic status. Morphological complexity lies not only in the amount of categories that verbs may express/ but also in the way these are encoded. Komnzo verbs exhibit what may be called ‘distributed exponence’/ i.e. single morphemes are underspecified for a particular grammatical category. Therefore/ morphological material from different sites has to be integrated first/ and only after this integration can one arrive at a particular grammatical category. The descriptive approach in this grammar is theory-informed rather than theory-driven. Comparison to other Yam languages and diachronic developments are taken into account whenever it seems helpful.
Subject 1
Humanities - Languages
ISBN13
9.78E+12
Publisher
Language Science Press
Resources
Open Textbook Library
License
Attribution
Recommended Citation
"A grammar of Komnzo" (2021). Open Textbooks. 575.
https://mds.marshall.edu/oa-textbooks/575
![A grammar of Komnzo](https://mds.marshall.edu/oa-textbooks/1574/thumbnail.jpg)