Introduction

This chapter provides background information on the languages of the Great Andamanese and Ongan language families and more specifically on Akabea, plus information on Akabea social structure, language contact, and the nature of the extant language documentation. It also provides a typological survey of Akabea, including features interesting for areal typology.

Discourse phenomena

This chapter presents the limited available material on various discourse phenomena: variable clausal constituent order, topicalization, ellipsis, afterthought additions, idioms, and formulaic expressions.

Conclusion and prospects

This chapter summarizes the achievements and limitations of the grammatical analysis.

Texts

This chapter presents six original texts, three narratives and three songs, with glosses, translation, and commentary.

Clauses

This chapter discusses the syntax of clauses, including constituent order. Particular attention is paid to different clause types: declarative, imperative, interrogative (polarity questions, constituent questions), exclamatory, and differences between copular and verbal clauses.

Phrases

This chapter presents the phrasal syntax of Akabea, in particular a detailed discussion of the noun phrase (including an extensive discussion of possessive noun phrases), and briefer discussions of the adjectival phrase and the postpositional phrase.

Words

This chapter provides extensive coverage of Akabea word classes: nouns, pronouns, definite article, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, postpositions, conjunction, particles, interjections, and ideophones, as well as of the language’s inflectional morphology (possessivity in nouns, number in nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and tense, aspect, and mood in verbs).

Complex sentences

This chapter presents the limited available material on complex sentences, in particular coordination of clauses, relative clauses, and complement clauses.

Stems

This chapter discusses the nature of Akabea roots and of stem-forming processes involving derivational affixes. Special attention is paid to the rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes, to multicategorial stems, and to the typologically highly unusual phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis.

Phonemes

This chapter covers the consonant and vowel phonemes of Akabea, stress, phonotactics, and morphophonological alternations. It also discusses our transcription, including limitations stemming from the imperfect primary documentation.