Languages of Papua New Guinea

This paper examines variations in the distribution of accusative case markers and pronominal articles in Namia, a Papuan language of the upper Sepik valley, Papua New Guinea. It is argued that these variations are linked to th transitivity of the clauses in which they occur, and largely bear out the claims of Hopper and Thompson (1980). The language also uses identical case marking for ditransitive themes (direct objects) and recipients (indirect objects); this feature suggests further work is required to exammine the thesis that languages always have a grammatical difference in the treatment of these semantic roles.