A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian

University of Chicago Press, Oct 31, 1988 - Foreign Language Study - 396 pages

The people who live in the Boumaa region of the Fijian island of Taveuni speak a dialect of Fijian that is mutually intelligible with Standard Fijian, the two differing as much perhaps as do the American and British varieties of English. During 1985, R. M. W. Dixon—one of the most insightful of linguists engaged in descriptive studies today—lived in the village of Waitabu and studied the language spoken there. He found in Boumaa Fijian a wealth of striking features unknown in commonly studied languages and on the basis of his fieldwork prepared this grammar.

Fijian is an agglutinating language, one in which words are formed by the profligate combining of morphemes. There are no case inflections, and tense and aspect as shown by independent clitics or words within a predicate complex. Most verbs come in both transitive and intransitive forms, and nouns can be build up regularly from verbal parts and verbs from nouns. The language is also marked by a highly developed pronoun system and by a vocabulary rich in areas of social significance.

In the opening chapters, Dixon describes the Islands' political, social, and linguistic organization, outlines the main points of Fijian phonology, and presents an overview of the grammar. In succeeding chapters, he examines a number of grammatical topics in greater detail, including clause and phrase structure, verbal syntax, deictics, and anaphora. The volume also includes a full vocabulary of all forms treated in discussion and three of the fifteen texts recorded from monolingual village elders on which the grammar is based.

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Dixon, rmw: A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian
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JSTOR: A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian
In conclusion, A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian provides some good examples and texts from a dialect of Fijian other than the Standard and highlights several ...
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anthrosource | American Anthropologist - 92(3):755 - Citation
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Linguamundi
Review of A grammar of Boumaa Fijian, by Dixon, rmw Grimes, Charles E. 1992. Review of A grammar of Boumaa Fijian, by Dixon, rmw Symons, Bruce. 1987. ...
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About the author (1988)

The compilers of this volume come from a mixture of backgrounds. Robert M. W. Dixon is Director of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at the Australian National University. He has done original field research on the indigenous languages of Australia, Fiji, and Amazonia, besides writing A
New Approach to English Grammar: On Semantic Principles (Clarendon Press, 1991). The late John Godrich was in the Merchant Navy and then worked as a clerk at Swansea Docks. Howard Rye, who like Dixon is an Oxford graduate, is an independent scholar of jazz and blues. He is principal researcher for
the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and is a regular contributor to jazz and blues publications. From 1980 to 1995, he was editor of Collectors Items.

Bibliographic information

Title	A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian
Author	R. M. W. Dixon
Edition	illustrated
Publisher	University of Chicago Press, 1988
ISBN	0226154297, 9780226154299
Length	396 pages
Subjects	Foreign Language Study › General Foreign Language Study / General Foreign Language Study / Miscellaneous

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