A sketch grammar of Meryam Mir

Abstract

Meryam Mir is a Papuan language spoken in the Torres Strait, that stretch of water which lies between Australia and Papua New Guinea. It has an A-O-V or S-V word order and an agglutinating morphology. Case inflections are suffixed to nominals to mark their syntactic role in the clause. Markers cross-referencing the syntactic arguments of the clause are affixed to the verb indicating number and, to some degree, person. In typological terms, the language can be regarded as a double-marking language. The following study is a sketch grammar of the language. Chapter 1 deals with the phonology. Chapter 2 examines briefly the different word classes and nominal morphology. Chapter 3 looks at verbals and their morphology. In Chapter 4, the system of deictic markers is presented outlining some of its functions and meanings. In Chapter 5, basic features of the syntax are outlined. Show more