Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- List of tables and figures -- Abbreviations -- Part I: Introduction -- 1 The language and its speakers -- Part II: The sound system -- 2 Phonology -- 3 Morphophonemics -- Part III: Word structure and word classes -- 4 Word structure -- 5 Word classes -- Part IV: The verb -- 6 Verbal predicate structure -- 7 Verb classes -- 8 Verbal categories -- 9 Valence-adjusting mechanisms -- Part V: The noun -- 10 Noun classes and nominal categories -- 11 Noun phrase syntax -- Part VI: Word formation -- 12 Word formation -- Part VII: Main clause structure -- 13 Syntactic functions and word order -- Part VIII: Special sentence types -- 14 Speech act distinctions -- 15 Negation -- Part IX: Complex constructions -- 16 Clause linking -- Part X: Information structure -- 17 Topic, focus, and emphasis -- References -- Appendix A. Grammatical morphemes -- Appendix B. Noun categorization devices -- Appendix C. Ideophones -- Appendix D. Text samples -- Index