A comprehensive grammar of Tiang

Tiang is an Oceanic language spoken by about 4000 people on Djaul Island in the northwest of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The present grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on eight months of immersion fieldwork in the Tiang community and follows the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory. Tiang is a nominative–accusative language with a basic constituent order of AVO. Compared to other Oceanic languages, it has a rather large number of vowel phonemes, among which there are three central vowels. Various phonological processes occur across morpheme boundaries, including lenition, vowel harmony, ablaut, fusion, palatalisation, and derhotacisation. Other outstanding features of Tiang are triplication, the distinction of ‘visible’ and ‘nonvisible’ demonstratives, and the presence of two past and two future tense markers. Like many other languages of the region, Tiang number words display a previously undescribed number word formation pattern, called Sequential Number Word Formation.