Kwaio grammar

[extract from the introduction]: Kwaio is an Austronesian language spoken by some 10,000 people in the mountainous central zone of Malaita, in south-eastern Solomon Islands. All the Malaita languages are relatively closely related; they fit into the Cristobal-Malaita subgroup of Southeast Solomonic languages. How these Southeast Solomonic languages fit into the wider comparative picture remains uncertain. Pawley ( 1 9 7 2 ) included them (along with North New Hebridean, Fijian and Polynesian) in a putative Eastern Oceanic (EO) subgroup. He has since had doubts (pawley 1977; see Grace 1976); the position of Southeast Solomonic remains in doubt. The issue is now complicated not only by a lack of strong evidence that Southeast Solomonic languages subgroup with the EO languages to the east but by Blust's proposal (1984) that Cristobal-Malaita languages may subgroup not with Guadalcanal-Gelic languages, but with the Nuclear Micronesian languages. Whether or not these languages of the south-eastern Solomons turn out to fit into an EO subgroup, they are very important in terms of historical linguistics by virtue of their striking conservatism in retaining POC grammatical (and phonological) patterns, and lexicon. (This conservatism has played an important part in the development of Oceanic linguistics since Ivens' Sa'a dictionary was drawn on by Dempwolff in his reconstructions of Proto-Austronesian.) [.....]