Author Description

Samoan Reference Grammar is the first extensive grammar of Samoan, by number of speakers the largest Polynesian language. The grammar is divided into eighteen chapters which cover phonetics, phonology, and orthography, word classification and morphology, the syntax of various types of phrases, simple clause structure, nominalization, dependent clauses, coordination, and finally, case marking and grammatical relations. The descriptive framework is not tied to a particular linguistic theory, but is based on the empirical findings of linguistic typology during the last two decades. The grammar is descriptive in the sense that it takes the Samoan ways of expression as the starting point of analysis and describes the meanings which are encoded by the various types of construction.