Ebook: A Grammar of Semelai

Semelai is a previously undescribed and endangered Aslian (Mon-Khmer) language of the Malay Peninsula. This book — the first in-depth description of an Aslian language — provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Semelai. Semelai intertwines two types of morphological system: a concatenative system of prefixes, suffixes and a circumfix — acquired through extended contact with Malay — and a nonconcatenative system of prefixes and infixes (including infix reduplication), inherited from Mon-Khmer. There are distinctive word classes — Nominals, Verbs and Expressives — the latter are iconic utterances which simultaneously provide information about the predicate and its arguments. Semelai has many derivational processes which change word class or affect transitivity, and it combines both head-marking and dependent-marking profiles. It also has a rich phonemic system of 20 vowel and 32 consonants. Nicole Kruspe’s discussion is complemented with a generous number of illustrative examples and texts, creating a reference work that will be welcomed by descriptivists and typologists alike.

NICOLE KRUSPE is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University, where she is working on a description of the Aslian language Ceq Wong. A Grammar of Semelai is a revised version of her doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Melbourne in 1999. Her dissertation was awarded the Chancellor’s Prize for Academic Excellence in 2001. She has carried out extensive fieldwork on a number of Aslian languages over the past thirteen years.