Henry Joan. Kombio Grammar Essentials

Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1992. — 123 p.The Kombio language has been classified as a Papuan language of the Torricelli Phylum, belonging to the Kombio stock. However it bears significant phonological and some grammatical resemblance to the Urim language, currently classified as a Torricelli phylum stock-level isolate.
The Torricelli languages have very different typologies from other Papuan languages and, in fact, share more common features with Austronesian languages than with Papuan. For example, Torricelli languages typically have SVO word order (rather than SOV), prepositions, and post-modifiers, in addition to irrealis mood and lack of medial verbs. Kombio differs from the typical Torricelli language in that it exhibits no subject concordance with verb prefixes and, in fact, has no gender distinction in its pronoun system. Kombio word order is particularly rigid due to the lack of morphological case markings to distinguish subject from object and so forth. Neither does it have the complex noun classes determined by shape nor separate plural forms as do other languages in its phylum. Torricelli languages also typically have a relatively simple morpological verb structure. While it is true that Kombio verbs have a single root form consistent through all paradigms, and thus are less complex than standard Papuan verb
systems, it is also true that the verb morphology is the single most complex grammatical structure in Kombio because of the shades of meaning communicated by varying combinations of the many aspect and mood particles.