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  • 25 - A Grammatical Sketch of Amele (Papuan, Papua New Guinea)

  • from Part Five - Grammatical Sketches
  • Edited by Delia Bentley, University of Manchester, Ricardo Mairal Usón, Universidad National de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Wataru Nakamura, Tohoku University, Japan, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Role and Reference Grammar
    Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023, pp 914-953

  • Summary

    This chapter describes the basic syntax of the Amele (Papuan) language from a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) perspective. Typologically, Amele has head-last syntax and is head-marking. Nominative-accusative agreement is suffixed to the verb stem and up to four arguments can be marked on the verb. There are only two major lexical categories, nouns and verbs, with very little overlap between these categories. Alternative undergoer selection may be made for ditransitive verbs. There is no passive construction in the language and the only choice for privileged syntactic argument (PSA) is [S, AT]. Focus may be expressed morphologically and by incorporation of modifier elements into the verb word. The language-specific topics featured are serial verb constructions and switch-reference (SR). SR applies to clauses in both coordinate and (some) embedded constructions. It is judged to be a local syntactic device for monitoring the referentiality of PSA arguments between adjacent clauses as to whether they have identical or non-identical reference.