Typological profile of the Great Andamanese family

Abstract

Abstract Great Andamanese constitutes alongside Ongan one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands. The phonological typology of the Great Andamanese languages includes a number of features of areal interest, including retroflex consonants (characteristic of South Asia) and lack of phonemic fricatives (reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian). Its morphosyntactic typology has some unremarkable features from a global typological perspective, such as verb-final clause order combined with postpositions and possessor-before-possessed but with postnominal attributive adjectives, alongside highly unusual features such as: somatic prefixes; several series of personal pronouns whose choice depends not only on grammatical relation/semantic role but also, for instance, on clause type; negation of a verbal clause by expressing it as the non-finite subject of a negative copular clause; and root ellipsis.