Lana Grelyn Takau
Lana Grelyn Takau is a freelance linguistics researcher working for the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. A native Ni‑Vanuatu originating from Paama and Pentecost parentage, she has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Newcastle in Australia. She lives in Vanuatu with her daughter and loves being outdoors.
A Grammar of Nese »
Authored by: Lana Grelyn Takau
Publication date: August 2023
Nese is a dying Oceanic language spoken on the island of Malekula, in northern Vanuatu. This book, based on first-hand fieldwork data, and without adhering to any particular syntactic framework, presents a synchronic grammatical description of Nese’s phonology and syntax. Despite being on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 20 living speakers, the language displays intriguing properties—including but not exclusive to the cross-linguistically rare apicolabial phonemes, interesting vowel-raising patterns in some word classes, and a discontinuous negation relationship that is obligatorily expressed with the irrealis mood marker. This book will probably be the last work published on Nese.