Komnzo: A language of Southern New Guinea

Abstract

This thesis provides an introduction to Komnzo, a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea. Komnzo is spoken by around 200 people in the village of Rouku and a couple of adjacent hamlets. 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 which the author recorded and transcribed between 2010 and 2015. The corpus adds up to ten hours of text including narratives, procedurals and naturally occuring social interaction.

The sequence of chapters follows the well-established order: phonology (2), word classes (3), nominal morphology (4), verb morphology (5) and TAM marking (6), noun phrase syntax (7), clausal syntax (8), interclausal syntax (9) and information structure (10). These chapters are supplemented by an anthropological, historical and sociolinguistic introduction (1), and they are rounded off by a chapter on lexicology (11). The appendix includes a 70-page dictionary with 1850 entries and three sample texts. The entire text corpus is accessible online.

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 verbs may express, but also in the way how these are encoded. Komnzo verbs exhibit what may be called `distributed exponence', that is single morphemes are underspecified for a particular grammatical category. Therefore, morphological material from different slots has to be integrated first, and only after this integration, one can 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.