Rukai, one of the 14 still extant Formosan languages, consists of six dialects (Tanan, Labuan, Budai, Mantauran, Maga, Tona) which are spoken in southern Taiwan.

This work presents a functional and empirically based account of the Mantauran (Rukai) grammar based on a large corpus that includes folktales and narratives as well as vocabulary and elicited sentences. The grammar is traditionally arranged. It begins with a study of Mantauran phonology (chapter 2), goes on investigating its morphology (chapters 3-8) and proceeds to the syntactic study of the phrase, the clause and the sentence (chapters 11-16). Chapters 9 and 10 represent a buffer between morphology and syntax. The morphological analysis is cast in terms of the morpheme-based approach and the syntactic analysis is drawn from the basic linguistic theory.

It is hoped that this grammar will be useful not only to the Rukai people but also to Formosanists, Austronesianists, typologists and linguists in general.