Stephen C. Levinson: A Grammar of Yélî Dnye: The Papuan language of Rossel Island

A Grammar of Yl Dnye (a.k.a.Yele, Glottocode yele1255) constitutes the most detailed grammar to date of the Papuan (i.e.non-Austronesian) language spoken on Rossel, a 30 km-long island around 300 kms off the eastern end of New Guinea.The grammar, the product of over 20 years of work in the language, thus supersedes the 100-page grammar (sketch?) by James Henderson (Henderson 1995), going way beyond it particularly in its syntactic analysis.The language itself is a veritable treasure trove for linguists, particularly those with a fondness for morphological complexity and its limits, and typologists, with various typologically unusual features like a very large inventory of phonemes, quite robust syntactic ergativity, and frequent lexical expression of various inflectional categories.This grammar is therefore an important contribution to linguistic description in Papua and worldwide, and Yl itself a testament to what the human brain can engineer without even trying.As is the case with many other contemporary grammars (see Mosel 2006), Levinson's grammar of Yl is organized in ascending order: starting with phonology and finishing with complex clausal syntax.Prior to the description itself, Levinson describes the climate, geology, (pre)history, economy, and folklore of the island in a lucid and engaging way in the introductory Chapter 1.Among the most interesting facts presented is the isolation of the island (which remained separated from the New Guinea mainland and other islands even during the last glacial maximum), and the fact that human presence on the island is, in all likelihood, extremely old.Levinson argues that this combination of isolation and social stability is responsible for the extraordinary levels of complexity shown by the language.This is in line with well-known claims in the literature on language contact and complexity (Kusters 2003;Lupyan and Dale 2010;Meinhardt et al. 2019;Trudgill 2011).Phylogenetically, Yl Dnye has been traditionally considered a language isolate and must remain so according to Levinson.This is so (with currently acceptable methods) despite the various grammatical structural similarities that link the language to South Bougainville ones (e.g.Motuna), and pronominal similarities, which