A Grammar of Coastal Marind

Bruno Olsson

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783110725551
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110747126
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1 Preliminaries

1.1 General information

The Coastal Marind language is spoken by ca. 7,000–9,000 people in Southern New Guinea. The 27 villages in which the language is spoken are situated on the coast of the Arafura Sea and along the Kumbe river, on territory that today belongs to Indonesia. The term ‘Marind’ is also used to denote a larger ethnic group consisting of speakers of the other Marindic languages (Bush Marind and Upper Bian Marind) as well as some neighbouring groups who speak unrelated languages (such as Marori) but who were (and are) under strong cultural and political influence of the larger Marindic-speaking group (van Baal 1966).

The origin of the word marind (in the Eastern dialect of Coastal Marind) or malin (in the Western dialect described here) is unknown. It is perhaps related to the name Maro, which is one of the main rivers in the Marind territory.

The Marindic languages are members of the Anim family (Usher and Suter 2015), a group comprising at least 15 languages spread across the linguistically diverse southern lowlands. It is likely that the Anim family will prove to be related to other languages in New Guinea, as a member of the so-called Trans-New Guinea family. Although the details of such relationships remain to be worked out, it is clear that the Marindic languages (and probably Anim in general) are typologically very different from other Trans-New Guinea languages (Wurm 1982: 95, Evans 2012: 117). For an overview of the languages of the Southern New Guinea area, see Evans et al. (2018a).

This grammar describes the Western dialect of Coastal Marind, as it is spoken in the villages Wambi and Duhmilah, and, with minor variations, in the surrounding villages. For information on the Eastern dialect, see Drabbe (1955).

1.1.1 Structural profile

1.1.1.1 Phonology

Coastal Marind has a relatively simple phonology (Chapter 2), like many other Papuan languages. There is a standard 5-vowel inventory /a e i o u/. The 19-member consonant inventory is slightly more unusual since it contrasts plain and prenasalised stops (e.g. / p b

/) and contains the preaspirated/voiceless glides /^hj ^hw/. There is no lexical tone. Stress is generally root-final and primarily realised by pitch. Lengthening is not distinctive.

1.1.1.2 Verbs

Verb morphology is extremely complex. I describe the verb structure as consisting of two independent phonological words — the ‘prefixal complex’ and the verb stem — which together form the verb complex (Chapter 8). The prefixal complex is a tight-knit affix cluster that may contain exponents of a wide range of inflectional categories, including: person/number indexing of agent-, recipient- and possessor-like participants, various types of aspectual morphology, two types of future marking, several applicative-like categories, various types of commands, marking of polar question as well as content questions, and an array of other markers that resist easy labelling. The inflectional categories are ordered according to a position class template, without any hierarchical structure or head-like elements (which could have motivated a description of the affix cluster as an inflecting auxiliary). Concatenation of the affixes involves complicated morphophonological processes. These are always predictable, however, and the following verb stem does not trigger any lexically specified affix suppletion, since it is phonologically separated from the prefixal complex.

The verb stem is itself host to a number of grammatical categories, such as Comitative and Pluractional prefixation. The exponents of these categories are generally more irregular than the affixes of the prefixal complex and their form as well as their meaning must sometimes be lexically stipulated. The verb stem is often followed by a suffix; this suffixal class primarily expresses aspectual notions.

In the interlinear glossing I separate the prefixal complex from the verb stem by means of a blank step, which indicates that they are independent phonological words. I add a trailing hyphen after the prefixal complex to indicate that the affix cluster forms a grammatical unit together with the ensuing stem. Examples:

(1)	a.	katal	ip-i-namb-ap-		ig-made
		money	DIST:I/II.PL-3PL>1-1.GEN-CT-		beg:2|3PL.U-PRS.HAB
	‘They usually ask me for money.’
	b.	ndom-ago		men-b-u-n-ind-a-y-		kama⟨ɣ⟩in
		bad-PRWD:III		PERF-ACT-2SG.A-1.DAT-ALL-1.DAT-1PL-		make⟨2SG.U⟩
		‘You ha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of maps, tables and figures
• Abbreviations and conventions
• 1 Preliminaries
• 2 Phonology
• 3 Nominals, their morphology and derivation
• 4 Pronouns and demonstratives
• 5 Nominal gender
• 6 Adpositions and particles
• 7 The syntax of phrases
• 8 Overview of the verb
• 9 Participant indexing I: The Actor, Dative and Genitive prefixes
• 10 Participant indexing II: Undergoer alternations
• 11 The system of Verb Orientation
• 12 Valence classes
• 13 Valence-changing constructions
• 14 Tense and aspect
• 15 Mood, attitude and engagement
• 16 Distribution of events in time and space
• 17 The Auxiliary, copula clauses and light verbs
• 18 Basic clausal syntax
• 19 Non-declarative speech acts
• 20 Combinations of clauses
• Appendix: Texts
• Index