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Mwotlap (Motlav), an unwritten Austronesian language belonging to the Oceanic subgroup, is spoken by about 1800 people living in northern Vanuatu – Melanesia, South Pacific. Throughout this general description of its grammar, several issues are addressed, all of which are topics relevant to current functional and typological linguistics: phonology and morpho-logy; syntactic categories; reference tracking, spatial deixis, possession and quantifiers; verb serialisation and valency; aspect and mood categories; discourse prag-ma-tics and speech acts. Each grammatical structure is not only described synchronically, but also situated along diachronic paths of evolution. This is how multiple grammaticalisation patterns, as well as complex processes of syntactic and semantic change, gradually come to light. Due to the pressure of numerous cognitive and structural constraints acting on the speaker's mind, the power of linguistic innovation may even give rise to spectacular upheavals.
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