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Description:
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The Merei language is spoken by about four hundred people in the villages
of Angoru, Navele, Tombet and Vusvogo in the interior of Espiritu Santo
Island , Vanuatu . Merei, like most other languages from the interior of
Espiritu Santo , has not previously been described. Merei is an SVO
language with many typical Oceanic features such as a split between
alienable and inalienable possession and frequent verb serialisation.
Morphological structure is relatively simple, but bi-morphemic nouns are
common. The language is rigidly head-marking and prepositional. This work
is mainly based on language data collected by the author in Navele village
in Espiritu Santo Island of Vanuatu, where he lived from May 1995 until
March 1997.
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