A grammar of Wano

This thesis is a descriptive analysis of Wano, a Trans-New Guinea language found in West Papua which is spoken by approximately 7,000 native speakers. The thesis includes: (i) an introduction of Wano topography and demography; a brief ethnographic sketch; some sociolinguistic issues such as name taboo, counting system and kinship terms; and typological profile of the language in chapter 1; (ii) morphophonological properties in chapter 2; (iii) forms and functions of nouns in chapter 3; (iv) verbs in chapter 4; (v) deixis in chapter 5; (vi) clause elements in chapter 6; and (vii) intransitive/transitive non-verbal predication in chapter 7; (viii) clause combination is consecutively observed in terms of coordination and subordination in chapter 8; serial verb constructions in chapter 9; clause linking in chapter 10; and bridging linkage in chapter 11. Chapter 12 sums-up the overall thesis. Wano has 11 consonantal and 5 vocalic phonemes expressed through their allophonic variations, consonantal assimilation and vocalic diphthongs. The only fricative phoneme attested is bilabial fricative /β/. There are two open and two closed syllable patterns where all consonants are syllable-onset, while approximants can also be syllable-coda. Vowels are syllable-nucleus. Stress is syllable-final which will be penultimate in cliticization. The phonology-morphology interface provides a significant contribution to the shaping of conjugational verbs, which, in turn, plays an essential role to an understanding of Wano verbal system where distinction between roots, stems, citation forms, sequential forms and tense-aspect-mood is defined. Wano is a polysynthetic language that displays an agglutinative-fusional morphology. Although the alienable-inalienable noun distinction is essentially simple in its morphology, the sex-distinction of the possessor between kin terms allows room for semantic-pragmatic complexity in the interpretation of their various uses. Wano has four non-verbal predications, consists of experiential event, nominal, adjectival, and deictic predicates. Wano is a verb-final language that allows pronominal pro-drop and has no rigid word order for arguments. A clause may consist only of (i) a single verb, (ii) a single inalienable noun, (iii) a serial verb construction, (iv) a combination of an inalienable noun with a verb, and or (v) a combination of an inalienable noun with a serial verb construction. To maintain discourse coherency, Wano makes use of tail-head linkage construction. The thesis consists of: pre-sections (i-xxxiii), contents (1-478), bibliography (479-498), and appendices (499-594) that include verb paradigms, noun paradigms, some oral texts and dialectal wordlist.