The volume contains five background chapters: The Oceanic Languages, Sociolinguistic Background, Typological Overview, Proto-Oceanic and Internal Subgrouping. Part of 2 vol set. Author Ross from ANU.

This new volume of the Language Family Series presents an overview of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages, spread across a region embracing eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. It provides sufficient phonological and grammatical data to give typologists and comparativists a good idea of the nature of these languag

This new volume of the Language Family Series presents an overview of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages, spread across a region embracing eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. It provides sufficient phonological and grammatical data to give typologists and comparativists a good idea of the nature of these languag

The main purpose of the book is to describe the Efate language. Comparison is made with other languages in order to elucidate certain aspects of Efate or as evidence in support of the author's theory that the Oceanic languages have their origin in Semitic.

Serial verbs and complex predicates have a long history of research, yet there is comparatively little documentation on Oceanic languages. This volume presents new data for further typological studies. While previous research on serial verbs in Oceanic languages was mostly devoted to "core" serial constructions (with non-contiguous sV(o)sV(o) nuclei), this volume contributes a more detailed investigation of the "nuclear" type of complex predicates involving contiguous sVV(o) nuclei. Complex predicates of the form VV may correspond to two different syntactic structures, either co-ranking or hierarchized (head-modifier). Though the VV pattern does evidence a tendency towards structural compression, often entailing the fusion of the argument structures of two or more nuclei, yet it cannot be reduced to cases of co-lexicalization, compounding or grammaticalization. The data also show the "nuclear" type to be compatible with all types of basic word orders (VSO, VOS, SVO, SOV), with no evidence that this results from any word order change. This challenges the claim that "nuclear" serialization correlates with verb-final order, and "core" serialization with verb-medial order.