| Acknowledgments | |
| List of abbreviations | |
| Introduction | 1 |
| 1 | Demographic and ethnographic information | 13 |
| 2 | Morphological typology | 20 |
| 3 | Grammatical categories | 32 |
| 4 | Constituent order typology | 71 |
| 5 | Noun and noun-phrase operations | 92 |
| 6 | Predicate nominals and related constructions | 111 |
| 7 | Grammatical relations | 129 |
| 8 | Voice and valence adjusting operations | 169 |
| 9 | Other verb and verb-phrase operations | 223 |
| 10 | Pragmatically marked structures | 261 |
| 11 | Clause combinations | 306 |
| 12 | Conclusions: the language in use | 342 |
| App. 1 | Elicited and text data | 366 |
| App. 2 | Sample reference grammars | 372 |
| Notes | 376 |
| References | 382 |
| Index of languages, language families, and language areas | 396 |
| Subject index | 402 |