FreTalk “Ngklompu and Typology of Exponence” with Mae Carroll, Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne

• Posted by: Admin
• Senin, 15 Desember 2025
• Has been read 49 time(s)

FreTalk on Monday, December 15, 2025, in the Soekarno Room, Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University, entitled “Ngklompu and Typology of Exponence”. The speaker is Mae Carroll, Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. The event was opened by the Vice Dean I, Dr. I Gede Oeinada, S.S., M.Hum. and accompanied by the Head of UP2M FIB, Prof. Dr. I Made Netra, S.S., M.Hum. The moderator of the event was Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg, PhD., who led the FreTalk event, attended by faculty members from the Faculty of Humanities , magister's and doctoral students.

The linguistic study “Ngkolmpu and Typology of Exponence” highlights the Ngkolmpu language, one of the regional languages in South Papua, as an extreme example in the world's inflectional morphological systems. The Ngkolmpu language, which belongs to the Yam language family and is spoken by around 200 speakers in Yanggandur Village, Merauke Regency, shows a very high level of complexity in grammatical marking of verbs.

This study compares Ngkolmpu with other languages in the world, including standard Indonesian, which does not have inflectional morphology despite being rich in derivational morphology. In Ngkolmpu, a single transitive verb can undergo inflection for more than 3,000 combinations of grammatical features, such as number and other categories, which are marked simultaneously through various morphological elements. Through this presentation, the researcher explains the various ways in which inflectional information is encoded in languages around the world and places the Ngkolmpu language on the global linguistic typology map. This study not only enriches our understanding of linguistic diversity, but also emphasizes the importance of preserving regional languages as a valuable source of linguistic knowledge.