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Chapter 2. Grammatical Sketch of Marshallese
This chapter includes a grammatical sketch of the Marshallese language. 2 Following a
brief introduction to Marshallese phonology and orthography in section 2.1, section 2.2
describes Marshallese morphology and investigates the morphology associated with
different grammatical categories, including nouns, determiners, pronouns, adjectives,
verbs, and adverbs. Section 2.3 discusses Marshallese syntax. I first discuss the word
order of determiner phrases, including those phrases with definite and indefinite
determiners, quantifiers, adjectives, possessive classifiers and relative clauses. Following
determiner phrases, prepositional phrases are briefly discussed. The remainder of the
chapter is devoted to IP and CP level syntax. Section 2.3.3 examines IP level syntax,
including verbless sentences in section 2.3.3.1 and sentences with overt verbs in section
2.3.3.2, although the vast majority of the discussion of basic word order is left until
Chapters 3 and 4. In the final section, which discusses CP level syntax, I examine
complementation, yes/no questions, embedded questions and wh- questions.
2.1 Marshallese phoneme inventory and orthography
What follows is only a brief discussion of Marshallese phonemes and orthography. For a
thorough discussion of Marshallese phonology, see Bender (1968, 1969b, 1973),
Harrison (1973), Zewen (1977), Choi (1992, 1995), McClintock (1999) and Hale (2000).
2.1.1 Consonants
Marshallese consonants have a primary and a secondary articulation site (Choi 1992,
1995). There are three primary places of articulation – bilabial, coronal and velar – and
2 When the information presented in this chapter does not come from my original research, it is cited as
such. Otherwise, the information presented in this chapter is the result of my own research.
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