Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Lamaholot is a Central Malayo-Polynesian language spoken on several islands of Eastern Indonesia. It is a language with fascinating agreement marking and this grammar is excellent: good descriptions and great glosses.

Lamaholot has over thirty dialects, and some of these have grammars, dictionaries, or both. The Lewoingu variety, however, has never been described before. Typologists as well as morpho-syntacticians will find this book very interesting. The book fills a gap since we have relatively few grammars of languages of eastern Indonesia.

The unmarked word order is subject-verb-object. Pro-drop is not typical in Lamaholot even though the verb has many subject and object markers. Depending on the verb, subject agreement is indicated by prefixes and/or suffixes. Subject pronouns are similar in form to the affixes, suggesting a historical change from pronoun to agreement marker.

There are no transitivity markers on verbs and many verbs can be either transitive or intransitive. Verbs used intransitively may have a suffix, but not verbs used transitively. This is also true for non-inherently reflexive verbs, such as gasik ‘count’, buka ‘open’, and pupu ‘gather’. The authors mention two accounts for the restriction on intransitive verbs. One is that historically there was object marking on verbs and that the suffix on an intransitive verb is a remnant of that object marker. Another is that there are a limited set of optional object markers and that there is only one suffix position on the verb, reserved for objects in the case of transitives.

Apart from the agreement markers that appear on many parts of speech (adjectives, adverbs, numerals, one preposition, and the coordinate conjunction), Lamaholot is fairly analytic. There are serial verbs, periphrastic causatives, auxiliaries, demonstratives, and prepositions. The last chapters of the book discuss questions, clefts, relatives, resumptive pronouns, and reflexives, building on some generative work. A well-glossed text is included. In short, this is an excellent book accessible to a wide audience.