37.3596, Diss: General Linguistics: Willem Burung: "A Grammar of Wano"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3596. Mon 02 Nov 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3596, Diss: General Linguistics: Willem Burung: "A Grammar of Wano"

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Date: 02-Nov-2026
From: Willem Burung [wburunggs at gmail.com]
Subject: A Grammar of Wano


Institution: St Catherine College, University of Oxford
Program: Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics
Degree Date: 2017
Level: PhD

Author: Willem Burung

Dissertation Title: A Grammar of Wano

Dissertation URL:
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:86a8eef7-4a10-420d-b445-400a0b2b974f

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Dissertation Director(s): Professor Mary Dalrymple and Professor
Wolfgang de Melo

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis is a descriptive analysis of Wano, a Trans-New Guinea
language found in West Papua that is spoken by approximately 7,000
native speakers. The thesis includes: (i) an introduction of Wano
topography and demography; a brief ethnographic sketch; some
sociolinguistic issues such as name taboo, counting system and kinship
terms; and typological profile of the language in chapter 1; (ii)
morphophonological properties in chapter 2; (iii) forms and functions
of nouns in chapter 3; (iv) verbs in chapter 4; (v) deixis in chapter
5; (vi) clause elements in chapter 6; and (vii)
intransitive/transitive non-verbal predication in chapter 7; (viii)
clause combination is consecutively observed in terms of coordination
and subordination in chapter 8; serial verb constructions in chapter
9; clause linking in chapter 10; and bridging linkage in chapter 11.
Chapter 12 sums up the overall thesis.
Wano has 11 consonantal and 5 vocalic phonemes expressed through their
allophonic variations, consonantal assimilation, and vocalic
diphthongs. The only fricative phoneme attested is bilabial fricative
/β/. There are two open and two closed syllable patterns where all
consonants are syllable-onset, while approximants can also be
syllable-coda. Vowels are syllable-nucleus. Stress is syllable-final,
which will be penultimate in cliticization. The phonology-morphology
interface provides a significant contribution to the shaping of
conjugational verbs, which, in turn, plays an essential role in an
understanding of the Wano verbal system, where distinction between
roots, stems, citation forms, sequential forms, and tense-aspect-mood
is defined.
Wano is a polysynthetic language that displays an
agglutinative-fusional morphology. Although the alienable-inalienable
noun distinction is essentially simple in its morphology, the sex
distinction of the possessor between kin terms allows room for
semantic-pragmatic complexity in the interpretation of their various
uses. Wano has four non-verbal predications, which consist of
experiential events, nominal, adjectival, and deictic predicates. Wano
is a verb-final language that allows pronominal pro-drop and has no
rigid word order for arguments. A clause may consist only of (i) a
single verb, (ii) a single inalienable noun, (iii) a serial verb
construction, (iv) a combination of an inalienable noun with a verb,
and or (v) a combination of an inalienable noun with a serial verb
construction. To maintain discourse coherency, Wano makes use of
tail-head linkage construction.


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