A Grammar of Lavukaleve (review)

Lavukaleve, a Papuan language spoken in the central Solomon Islands, is classified as belonging to the East Papuan Phylum, Central Solomons family, although the languages of the family are all rather different structurally and share little common vocabulary. There has been almost no previous work on the language. Although most Lavukals still grow up speaking Lavukaleve as their first language, the language is under increasing threat from English and Pijin. Terrill’s grammar is a welcome addition to Mouton’s ‘Grammar library’ series, the second Papuan language in the series.

The grammar is organized into five sections (plus back matter, which contains forty pages of texts, an affix list, and a list of the hundred and fifty most frequent lexemes in the corpus). Section 1 contains introductory material, phonology, and criteria for defining word classes; Section 2, ‘Arguments and adjuncts’, provides details of noun formation and noun phrase syntax, gender, and the very complicated deictic system. The third section, on predicate structure, contains an overview of the marking of grammatical relations, agreement, TAM marking, nominalization, valency-changing derivations, focus marking, and complex predicates (labeled ‘serial verbs’ and ‘compounds’). Section 4 contains two chapters on interclausal syntax (coordination and subordination), while the last section is a discussion of questions and discourse organization. There is also a set of sample texts and a fairly detailed combined index of names, languages, and subjects. There are almost a thousand examples in the work, both elicited and textual. T writes clearly and has achieved the considerable accomplishment of providing a highly readable account of a set of highly complex systems.

The grammar is particularly strong in some areas, including focus marking and deixis. An entire chapter is devoted to focus constructions, and another to deixis. Complex predicates are also discussed in detail; Lavukaleve has not only serialization and compounding but also complex predicates involving the light verbs hai ‘do’ and sia ‘do, be, become, happen’. Lavukeleve’s gender agreement principles and split ergativity will interest many. Verb agreement is sensitive to focus marking; one type of focus marking interacts with agreement. Sentence focus triggers subject agreement, while predicate focus triggers object agreement. Agreement is found not only on the verb but also on the focus marker.

T’s grammar of Lavukaleve will be of interest not only to Papuanists but also to anyone with an interest in typology, argument structure, and morphology.