Doctoral thesis

A grammar of Muyu

This thesis is a grammar of Muyu, a Papuan language of Western New Guinea in the east of Indonesia. It is spoken by around 2000 people in 22 villages in the Boven Digoel regency and in suburbs of several coastal cities. The language belongs to the Ok language family of the Trans New Guinea phylum and is severly endangered. This work is the first comprehensive grammar on Muyu. It is based on nearly 11 months of fieldwork during which a corpus of audio-visual recordings, transcripts and translations has been compiled. The corpus is the primary data source for all analyses in the thesis. This study covers a wide range of topics that are described in 12 chapters. Beyond the expected chapters on phonology, verb morphology and clause syntax, the description has a special focus on complex predicates. Typologically, the most interesting features are verbal number and the extensive use of multi-verb constructions (MVCs). The word class of demonstratives is especially rich and covers a wide area of functions. Furthermore, we find many typical TNG features: gender agreement on the verb, verb-final clause syntax, a lack of nominal morphology, switch reference and tail-head linkage. The appendix of this grammar includes two fully glossed texts and a large word list (Muyu-English) with over 2500 entries. The grammar is accompanied by an openly accessible collection of language material archived in the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR).

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