A grammar of south efate

Abstract

This volume presents topics in the grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Central Vanuatu as spoken in Erakor village on the outskirts of Port Vila. There has been no previous grammatical description of the language, which has been classified as the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu subgroup of languages. In this description I show that South Efate shares features with southern Vanuatu languages, including a lack of serial verb constructions of the kind known for its northern neighbors and the use of an echo-subject marker. The phonology of South Efate reflects an ongoing change in progress, with productive medial vowel deletion and consequent complex heterorganic consonant clusters.