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Linguistic typology is an all-embracing discipline central for inductively-based cross-linguistic generalizations, supported by language facts. Firsthand investigation of previously undescribed languages from regions known for their linguistic diversity helps expand our knowledge about the nature of language and the parameters of cross-linguistic variation. We explore the options of marking commands in a non-main clause and the issue of associative non-singular number in Yalaku and in Manambu (from Papua New Guinea), before turning to nominal aspect and non-propositional evidentiality (exemplified with Tariana and Jarawara, from Brazilian Amazonia). Previously undescribed languages help typologists expand and test our analytic frameworks [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papua New Guinea is home to >10% of the world's languages and rich and varied biocultural knowledge, but the future of this diversity remains unclear. We measured language skills of 6,190 students speaking 392 languages (5.5% of the global total) and modeled their future trends using individual-level variables characterizing family language use, socioeconomic conditions, students' skills, and language traits. This approach showed that only 58% of the students, compared to 91% of their parents, were fluent in indigenous languages, while the trends in key drivers of language skills (language use at home, proportion of mixed-language families, urbanization, students' traditional skills) predicted accelerating decline of fluency to an estimated 26% in the next generation of students. Ethnobiological knowledge declined in close parallel with language skills. Varied medicinal plant uses known to the students speaking indigenous languages are replaced by a few, mostly nonnative species for the students speaking English or Tok Pisin, the national lingua franca. Most (88%) students want to teach indigenous language to their children. While crucial for keeping languages alive, this intention faces powerful external pressures as key factors (education, cash economy, road networks, and urbanization) associated with language attrition are valued in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yalaku, a Ndu language from the Middle Sepik region of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, has no dedicated comparative construction -- just like an overwhelming majority of Papuan languages of New Guinea (de Vries 2015). After a brief outline of typological features of the language, we turn to the ways of expressing comparative meanings. The expression of similarity is the topic of §3. The last section contains a summary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manambu, a Ndu language from the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, has a complex system of marking positive and negative imperatives. Imperative is the main means of marking directive speech acts, including orders and requests, in the language. The marking and the categories expressed in the imperative are different from declarative and interrogative verbs. Other means of expressing directive speech acts--wishes, desires, requests, and invitations--serve to mitigate the force of command, or increase it, depending on the relationships between speaker and addressee. Such command strategies include irrealis, optative, purposive, desiderative, desubordinated clauses, questions, and nominalizations. A typologically unusual feature of Manambu imperatives is the availability of more negative than positive forms. Imperative forms in Manambu retain a number of archaic features, alongside language-specific innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manambu, a Ndu language from East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea, has a complex system of demonstratives, with many typologically unusual features. Nominal demonstratives distinguish three degrees of distance: close to speaker, close to addressee, and distal from both. They can contain markers of further distance or of topographic deixis, which reflects spatial orientation frames 'uphill', 'upriver', 'downhill', 'downriver', and 'offriver'. A special set of demonstratives marking 'current relevance' can express further distance and topographic deixis. Some, but not all, demonstratives have anaphoric functions. Cataphoric functions are attested just for manner demonstratives. A noun phrase may contain two demonstratives, specifying information that cannot be expressed within one word. The article concludes with a discussion of functional markedness within the Manambu demonstrative system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Every language has some way of reporting what someone else has said. To express what Jakobson [Jakobson, R., 1990. Shifters, categories, and the Russian verb. Selected writings. Word and Language. Mouton, The Hague, Paris, pp. 130–153] called ‘speech within speech’, the speaker can use their own words, recasting the original text as their own, within an ‘indirect’ speech construction. Or the other person may be quoted ‘directly’, just as they said it, or more or less so. One major difference between direct and indirect speech lies in the way person specification within the speech report is cast. In direct speech, person reference is expressed exactly as it was in the original speech report. In indirect speech, the person reference is shifted to the perspective of the speaker. There is a third option – a ‘middle ground’ situation known as ‘semi-direct’ speech – with incomplete person shift. Semi-direct speech often involves coreferentiality between the current speaker – rather than the author of the speech report – and a participant within the speech report. In Manambu, a Ndu language spoken in the New Guinea area, semi-direct speech differs from both direct and indirect speech in a few interesting ways. Further examples of semi-direct speech and its various guises come from a number of African languages, other languages from New Guinea area, and Colloquial English. The existence of a semi-direct speech construction brings an additional dimension to the typology of speech reports: the necessity of including the perspective of current speaker in the overall picture. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]