Fedden O. A Grammar of Mian, a Papuan Language of New Guinea

Parkville: University of Melbourne, 2007. — 499 p.Mian (known as Mianmin in the literature) is a Papuan language of the Ok family. The Ok family of languages is comparatively well-established within the Trans-New Guinea (TNG) family, as a group of roughly the same order of internal diversification as Germanic or Romance within Indo-European. Mian is spoken by about 3,500 people in the North-western part of Telefomin District, Sandaun Province in Papua New Guinea.This thesis is a descriptive grammar of the Mian language of Papua New Guinea. The corpus data on the basis of which I analyzed the structures of the language and their functions was obtained during nine months of field work in Yapsiei and Mianmin, Telefomin District, Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea.The areas of grammar I cover in this thesis are phonology (ch. 2), word classes (ch. 3), nominal classification (ch. 4 and 5), noun phrase structure (ch. 6), verb morphology (ch. 7), argument structure and syntax of the clause (ch. 8), serial verb constructions and clause chaining (ch. 9), operator scope (ch. 10), and embedding (ch. 11).