Books by William A. Foley

A great deal of the grammatical machinery in a language is devoted to the speaker's ability to signal the temporal relations between different events and different people making it clear who is being talked about. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar explores how different grammatical systems accomplish this.

The Papuan languages number over 700 (or 20 per cent of the world's total) in more than 60 language families. This introduction to the descriptive and historical linguistics of the Papuan languages of New Guinea provides an accessible account of one of the richest and most diverse linguistic situations in the world.