A Grammar Qaqet

This grammar is a first detailed description of Qaqet, a non-Austronesian language spoken in the mountainous interior of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. Qaqet belongs to the small Baining language family (comprising six languages), but its wider genetic affiliations remain unclear. It is included among the geographically-defined East Papuan languages.

The grammar presents a synchronic description of the language. From a language family perspective, the Baining languages are structurally fairly similar, but there are considerable differences in detail that point to different language-internal developments and grammaticalization paths. From an East Papuan and areal perspective, Qaqet exhibits both typical East Papuan features (e.g., nominal classification, possessor/possessed order, highly compositional lexicon) as well as areal features (e.g., AVO ~ SV constituent order, articles and determiners, prepositions). The description is based on primary data collected during fieldwork (from 2011 onwards), including both natural and elicited data.

The description thereby provides new analyses and insights that are relevant to our understanding of the genetic and areal relationships in this region.

Autorentext

Birgit Hellwig, University of Cologne, Germany

Klappentext

This grammar is a description of Qaqet, a non-Austronesian language spoken in the interior of East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. It belongs to the small Baining language family, and it is included among the geographically-defined East Papuan languages. Based on a large corpus of elicited and natural data, the grammar gives a detailed account of the structure of the language, placing it into a language family and areal perspective.