Kwamera

There are slightly more than one hundred languages spoken by the 150,000 inhabitants of the Republic of Vanuatu in the southwest Pacific. Kwamera is one of five languages spoken by almost 3000 people on the island of Tanna in that country. Like its close relatives, however, it is somewhat aberrant phonologically, morphologically and lexically in comparison withmost of the 400 or so other members of the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian. This monograph describes the structure of Kwamera, paying particular attention to phonology and morphophonemics, to the complex verb morphology, to the range of possessive constructions, and to interclausal phenomena of various kinds.