A documentation and description of Yelmek

Abstract

Yelmek is a small endangered language spoken in the south-west of New Guinea. It is a member of the Yelmek-Maklew family, a maximal clade language family, which has less than a thousand fluent speakers by my estimation. The present work is the first in-depth description of any variety of this language family. It is based on a total of 12-month original fieldwork.

In some ways, Yelmek is typical for a language of Southern New-Guinea. Its verbal morphology is exceedingly complex, while syntactic relations are expressed mainly by parataxis. In other ways, it is very different, not just compared to languages of the region. Its most striking grammatical feature, typologically speaking, is the suppletion for gender in the verbal paradigm. Yelmek distinguishes two genders, masculine and feminine, which align with biological sex but are also assigned to inanimate objects. The only agreement target for gender is the verb; nowhere else is gender expressed grammatically. This in itself is typologically rare. On the verb, the gender of both the subject and the direct object is indexed. The subject indexing uses affixes and pre-verbal particles for gender marking, but the object indexing expresses gender by stem change. The morphological nature of the stem change depends on the verb and ranges from vowel change to full suppletion.

This thesis is structured in a traditional way for a grammar. The first chapter introduces the speaker and the language situation. The second chapter talks in more detail about the linguistic classification and the internal relations of the Yelmek and Maklew varieties towards each other. The actual language description starts in Chapter 3 with a discussion of phonemes and phonological. The next chapter, Chapter 4, introduces and discusses the different parts of speech in Yelmek. Chapter 5 and 6 are dedicated to nominal morphology, whereas Chapter 7, 8 and 9 discuss different aspects of the verbal morphology. The last three chapters are dedicated to clausal structure.