A Grammar of Ulwa

Abstract

This dissertation is a grammatical description of Ulwa [ISO 639-3 yla, Glottocode yaul1241], a severely endangered language spoken by fewer than 700 people in the Angoram District of the East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea. This is the first grammatical description of any member of the Ulmapo family, which consists of Ulwa, Mwakai [mgt, mong1344] and Pondi [lnm, lang1328]. Ulwa is spoken by elder residents of four villages: Manu, Maruat, Dimiri, and Yaul. Whereas the Maruat, Dimiri, and Yaul communities speak versions of Ulwa that are all rather similar to one another, the Manu version is considerably different. Ulwa may thus be said to consist of two major dialects. The focus of this grammatical description is the Manu dialect, which has about 70 fluent speakers (roughly 10% of the total Ulwa-speaking community). The data underlying this work have been gathered during eleven months of field research that I conducted over the course of three trips to Manu village between 2015 and 2017. This work aims to provide a basic description of Ulwa’s phonology, morphology, and syntax. While this dissertation attempts to analyze and describe all the main features of Ulwa grammar, there remain some features that are not treated here, mostly because they do not occur in the corpus I have collected. There are also some phenomena that remain unclear. I attempt to mention these where possible, though they receive no specific attention in this dissertation.