A Grammar of Teiwa

Teiwa is a non-Austronesian ('Papuan') language spoken on the island of Pantar, in eastern Indonesia. It has approximately 4,000 speakers and is highly endangered. The genetic relationship between the Alor-Pantar languages and other Papuan languages remains controversial. Located some 1,000 km from their putative Papuan neighbors on the New Guinea mainland, they are the most distant westerly Papuan outliers. This volume presents a grammatical description of one of these 'outlier' languages. The grammar is based on primary field data, collected by the author in 2003-2007. A selection of glossed and translated Teiwa texts of various genres and word lists (Teiwa-English / English-Teiwa) are included.

Review:

[...] this grammar is a most enjoyable read. While some areas of the grammar remain underexplored, Klamer does an excellent job of describing enough of the language in sufficient detail to allow further investigation based on the available texts. Open questions and underexplored areas are acknowledged as such. Despite the relatively short time the author spent in the field, she demonstrates deep knowledge of the language. This book will become an important resource for scholars working on Papuan languages and Alor-Pantar languages in particular. The data and analyses provided will be valuable to linguists more generally, especially typologists interested in topics as diverse as grammatical relations, serial verb constructions, verbal morphology (e.g. reality status marking), as well as demonstratives and spatial deixis. Nicholas Williams in: Linguist List 22.3994