The Manambu Language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea

Alexandra Aikhenvald is Professor of Linguistics and Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University. Her books include Structural and Typological Classification of Berber (Moscow 1986-7), Modern Hebrew (Moscow 1990), Classifiers (OUP 2000), Language Contact in Amazonia (OUP 2002), and Evidentiality (OUP 2004). She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology in which four volumes have so far appeared.

• 1. Introduction. The Language, and its Speakers ; 2. Phonology ; 3. Grammatical Relations ; 4. Word Classes ; 5. Gender Marking, Semantics, and Agreement ; 6. Number ; 7. Case Marking ; 8. Possession ; 9. Derivation and Compounding ; 10. Closed Classes ; 11. Verbal Morphology: An overview ; 12. Verbal Categories in Positive Declarative and Interrogative Clauses ; 13. Mood and Modality ; 14. Negation ; 15. Verb Compounding ; 16. Directionals, and Valency-Changing Devices ; 17. Complex Predicates ; 18. Clause Linking and Dependent Clauses ; 19. Other Dependent Clauses, and Further Features of Clause Linking ; 20. Clause Types, and Discourse-Pragmatic Devices ; 21. Issues in Semantics, and Features of Lexicon ; 22. Genetic and Areal Relationships, and New Developments in the Language ; Texts ; Vocabulary ; List of Affixes ; References ; Index of Authors, Languages, and Subjects

to call it merely a "grammar" does not do justice to the extraordinary accomplishment and intellectual richness represented by this book. In so many ways, Aikhenvald's book qualifies as a model of what linguists with modern sensitivities should be aiming for when setting out to write a grammar of an indigenous language based on fieldwork ... In summary, Aikhenvald's grammar of Manambu is a sheer tour de force, not just on account of the thoroughness of the grammatical description and analysis, but equally on account of the depth of the engagement of the researcher with the speakers and the community as reflected throughout the book.