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In this article I demonstrate that there is a pervasive lexico-semantic association bones are strength in the languages of Melanesia, but that its linguistic expression is highly varied; languages are scattered along a lexical-to-clausal cline in their expression of the association between bone and strength, with a large number of language-specific idioms based on the association to be observed in Melanesia. I argue that the striking areality of this lexico-semantic association is readily missed in top-down approaches to lexical semantic typology that rely, for instance, on databases of word lists, or on narrow search domains limited to the meanings of simplex lexemes.

The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most significant linguistic hotspot in the world, with around 1275 languages in 40 separate families.This volume gives an account of the families and main languages of each area in the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of the better described languages, along with a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact.

Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili.The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

International audience; This paper investigates smell/kiss colexification, the lexical semantic association of transitive verbs of smelling with verbs expressing certain types of conventionalised gestures of greeting and/or affection (i.e., kissing). Whilst found sporadically in the languages of the world, smell/kiss colexification is common in languages of all families of Southeast Asia. The prevalence of the lexical association reflects an ancient, endemic Southeast Asian practice in which kissing involves the nose, rather than the mouth, as the primary organ. This study demonstrates the potential of lexical semantic typology to contribute to identifying linguistic areas and cultural practices shared across them.

This paper explores the use of demonstratives in non-embedded clausal nominalisations. We present data and analysis from three Papuan languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family in south-east Indonesia. In these languages, demonstratives can apply to the clausal as well as to the nominal domain, contributing contrastive semantic content in assertive stance-taking and attention-directing utterances. In the Timor-Alor-Pantar constructions, meanings that are to do with spatial and discourse locations at the participant level apply to spatial, temporal and mental locations at the state or event level.

This squib reexamines the evidence for Blust's reconstruction of *kandoRa 'cuscus' and *mans(aə)r 'bandicoot' to the ancestor of the putative Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian family. I argue that the reconstructions are problematic, being unable to account for the distribution and semantics of reflexes in the Austronesian languages in eastern Indonesia. Examining data from Austronesian and Papuan languages in this region, I consider alternative histories for marsupial terms involving independent innovations, semantic shifts, and diffusion.

Possession in some Austronesian languages shows levels of elaboration far in excess of cross-linguistic norms, while in others it is strikingly unelaborated. The appearance of alienable/inalienable contrasts has been assumed to result from contact with Papuan languages, and the existence of a paradigm of indirect possessive classifiers is cited as one of the pieces of evidence for the Oceanic subgroup, while acknowledging that indirect possession constructions can be found in Malayo-Polynesian languages further west. We argue that the appearance of possessive classifiers in these languages is also the result of contact with Papuan languages west of New Guinea.

Wallacea is home to languages of the Austronesian language family, and to languages from multiple Papuan, or non-Austronesian, language families. It has long been observed that the Austronesian languages of Wallacea display Papuan influences. Some linguists have attempted to define linguistic Wallacea (albeit under other names) in terms of this hybridity. The present article however shows that the zone of Papuan influence on Austronesian languages is much wider than Wallacea, encompassing areas east as well as west of New Guinea. Within this wider zone, called here Linguistic Melanesia, a more restricted Wallacean linguistic area can nevertheless be identified as a subcategory defined by a set of specific features not found elsewhere in Linguistic Melanesia. There is evidence that Linguistic Wallacea is the result of prehistoric interactions between Austronesian migrants and a pre-existing population of seafaring Papuan agriculturalists, who were already well established in Wallacea before the Austronesians arrived.

The Bunaq are a Papuan language-speaking people straddling the border of Indonesian West Timor and independent East Timor. This paper looks at the history of the Bunaq as a “border“ people in Timor. “Border“ is interpreted here in two ways, as referring to: (i) a political division, the boundary line separating one country from another, and (ii) a linguistic division, the distinguishing line between Papuan and Austronesian languages. I examine the effect that the Bunaq position at the political and linguistic borders of Timor has had on the people and their language.