A grammar of the Hoava Language, Western Solomons

This description of Hoava, an Oceanic Austronesian language spoken on parts of New Georgia in the western Solomon Islands, is the first published reference grammar of a language from this area. The islands of the New Georgia group are home to a remarkable diversity of languages, and their Austronesian languages bear an unusual mixture of conservative and innovative features. The author pays particular attention to verbal morphology and its relation to argument structure and applicativisation, and her description will interest Oceanists and typologists alike. Hoava is genealogically quite a close relative of Roviana, aspects of which are described in S.H. Corston's Ergativity in Roviana, Solomon Islands (Pacific Linguistics 1996). Nonetheless, the grammars of the two languages differ quite sharply, in which ways which diachronic syntacticians will find intriguing.