A guideline for Papuan grammar essentials

Author : John Roberts

Publication date : 1992

Goals

"These are suggestions for the contents and outline of a grammar essentials with particular application to Papuan (Non Austronesian) languages of PNG." (Roberts, 1992: 1). This questionnaire, intended for linguists, covers phonology, morphology, word level, phrase structure, clause structure, complex sentence structure, discourse and lexical considerations.

Protocol summary

Linguists can use these suggestions as a guideline when writing a Papuan language description. They have to follow the instructions/explanations given by the author in each section.

The framework of the guideline:
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Word Level: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, pro-forms, postpositions (prepositions), numerals, conjunctions and complementizers, verb auxiliaries, particles and clitics.
- Phrase Structure: noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, postpositional phrase, numeral phrase.
- Clause Structure: order, grammatical relations, topic and focus, clause types, clause operators, conjoining
- Complex Sentence Structure: complementation, adverbial clause, coordination.
- Discourse Considerations
- Lexical Considerations

 

Development context

"Where the language is spoken, its classification, a description of the corpus of data the description is based on and how much of it, when it was collected, who the principal language helpers were, etc., references to anything else written on the language, highlight the linguistically interesting features of the language." (Roberts, 1992: 1)