Niuean

Diane Massam is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, where she has also served as Chair. She has been an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Auckland, and visiting professor at Harvard University, and has served as President of the Canadian Linguistic Association, as well as on several editorial boards. She currently holds an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to research Niuean argument structure. Her main research interests are argument structure, case, predication, and word order, with a focus on the Niue language and on register in English, and she has published extensively on these topics in journals and edited volumes. She is the editor of Count and Mass Across Languages (OUP, 2012) and, with Jessica Coon and Lisa deMena Travis, of The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity (OUP 2017).

• General Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1: Introduction: Fakaalofa lahi atu 2: The structure of the predicate and its place in the sentence 3: The arguments: High argument merge 4: Inside the noun phrase and on the edge of the sentence 5: Niuean ergativity and overall reflections References Index

In its totality, it is very satisfying to have the wealth of data present in this book all in one place. The book itself is aesthetically pleasing, with clear writing and a very helpful index. One strength in this domain is the clarity with which Massam handles different terminology throughout the text and across the generative literature. Moreover, the synthesis of prior literature gives this volume the feel of a reference work on generative approaches to several major topics, including verb-initial word order, argument tructure, and ergativity. Reading through this book gave me the impression that Massam wrote it not only as an avenue to advance our understanding of these properties of language, but also as a labor of love for the language itself. I expect that this new work by Massam will have a similarly large impact as her earlier work on this language.