This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland
of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological morphological and
syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family and with little
historical contact with surrounding languages the language provides evidence of the kind of
languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion. The grammar
provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory morphology syntax and select semantic
fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds a
morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements complex rules for negation
and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic
fields for example in partonymies of the body taxonomies of the natural world verbal
semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic 'rara' suggest that linguistic
evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of
special interest to linguists typologists sociolinguists anthropologists and researchers in
Oceania and Melanesia. Endorsement: This long-awaited grammar is a major contribution to Papuan
and general linguistics providing as it does by far the most comprehensive and accurate
grammatical description of a language that has already assumed a position as one of the world's
most complicated. Hitherto the most extensive grammatical description of the language has been
the survey-like Henderson (1995) and while Levinson explicitly acknowledges his debt to this
earlier grammar and to unpublished work by Henderson his own detailed grammar clearly takes
the level of description and analysis of the language to a completely new level. In particular
Levinson's grammar makes clear precisely to what extent and in what ways the language's
morphology is complex beyond even what most studies on morphologically complex languages
envisage. In addition it provides a much more detailed account of the language's syntax based
on a judicious combination of corpus attestation and careful elicitation (incl. using the kits
developed by Levinson's group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics). The grammar thus not only
fills a major lacuna in our knowledge of the non-Austronesian languages of the New Guinea area
but also provides grist for future studies on the implications of the language's
complexities.Bernard Comrie University of California Santa Barbara
