This grammar provides the first modern comprehensive description of Coastal Marind. It is a
Papuan language spoken by the coastal-dwelling Marind-Anim formerly expansionistic
head-hunters of the Southern New Guinea lowlands. Like the other languages of the poorly known
Anim family Coastal Marind features astonishingly complex verb morphology and a range of
unusual phenomena including indexing of up to four arguments on the verb verbal marking of
focus (the 'Orientation' system) engagement prefixes tracking the attention of the addressee
and a system of four genders realised by intricate agreement patterns. The structure of the
language is examined in a detailed but accessible way and its many complexities are brought to
life by contextualised spontaneous data drawn from a rich audio-visual corpus.
