Coastal Marind is spoken by about seven to nine thousand people in Southern New Guinea, says Olsson, in 27 villages along the coast of the Arafura Sea and along the Kumbe River, territory that today belongs to Indonesia. The Marindic languages are members of the Anim language family, which contains at least 15 papers spread across the linguistically diverse southern lowlands. His grammar addresses such matters as pronouns and demonstratives, participant indexing, valence classes, the distribution of events in time and space, and non-declarative speech acts. It is substantially revised from his 2017 PhD dissertation at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Annotation ©2021 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
This grammar provides the first modern, comprehensive description of Coastal Marind. It is a Papuan language spoken by the coastal-dwelling Marind-Anim, formerly expansionistic head-hunters of the Southern New Guinea lowlands. Like the other languages of the poorly known Anim family, Coastal Marind features astonishingly complex verb morphology and a range of unusual phenomena, including indexing of up to four arguments on the verb, verbal marking of focus (the 'Orientation' system), engagement prefixes tracking the attention of the addressee, and a system of four genders realised by intricate agreement patterns. The structure of the language is examined in a detailed but accessible way, and its many complexities are brought to life by contextualised spontaneous data, drawn from a rich audio-visual corpus.
The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.
