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The Binanderean languages extend from southern Morobe Province into most of Oro Province, occupying 270 km of Papua New Guinea coastline that now lacks any Austronesian languages. Nevertheless, traces of contact with Oceanic languages can be found among Binanderean languages, even in a few Proto-Binanderean reconstructions. Binanderean influence also shows up in the Oceanic languages at either end of that coastline. This work presents linguistic and recent ethnohistorical evidence of Oceanic-Binanderean contact. In Oro Province, Oceanic Maisin has been so heavily affected that scholars once argued about whether it was basically Austronesian or Papuan. The word order of Oceanic Papuan Tip languages has also been influenced by Binanderean word order, while Binanderean Korafe shows evidence of close contact with Oceanic neighbors. In Morobe Province, Oceanic Numbami has been in close contact with neighboring Guhu-Samane, which forms a very divergent relative of Binanderean. Guhu-Samane may owe some of its divergent features to extended contact with Oceanic languages like Numbami (and perhaps now-extinct dialects of Numbami). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study documents the analogical changes in the speech of four Alamblak men over a period from twenty-five to thirty-eight years. The data reveal many changes that were not apparently phonologically predictable by several phonological hypotheses that have been proposed in the literature on paradigm leveling. Many changes made by the subjects of the study were reversed by themselves over the time period of the study. The reversals of earlier changes suggest that change is influenced by existing paradigms and the autonomy and automatization of allomorphs in certain lexical contexts. The idiosyncratic nature of other changes suggests that they were not entirely determined by those processes of language use, but that speaker-initiated grammar replacement had occurred, perhaps motivated by a goal of paradigmatic uniformity. The study points out that young speakers were faced with a surface complexity of alternating morphemes due to a highly abstract phonological system underlying the adult speech in 1970. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Papuan language Mian allows us to refine the typology of nominal classification. Mian has two candidate classification systems, differing completely in their formal realization but overlapping considerably in their semantics. To determine whether to analyse Mian as a single system or concurrent systems we adopt a canonical approach. Our criteria - orthogonality of the systems (we give a precise measure), semantic compositionality, morphosyntactic alignment, distribution across parts of speech, exponence, and interaction with other features - point mainly to an analysis as concurrent systems. We thus improve our analysis of Mian and make progress with the typology of nominal classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholars agree that grammatical borrowing is a serious obstacle to syntactic reconstruction, but to date there have been few proposed solutions to this methodological conundrum. In this paper I propose a method, couched in a constructional view of language, for mitigating the problem of borrowing in syntactic reconstruction. The method begins with the reconstruction of partially schematic constructions, whose phonological material can be tested for cognacy. Fully schematic reconstructions are then achieved via generalizations made over sets of reconstructed constructions. I exemplify the effectiveness of this method by applying it to two pieces of grammar from the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea: clause chain nominalization and the desiderative construction. The method allows the reconstruction of the former, but identifies the latter as a likely grammatical borrowing and therefore not reconstructable to Proto-Sogeram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Timor-Alor-Pantar family includes approximately thirty Papuan languages spoken in Eastern Indonesia and East Timor. Recent years have seen substantial progress on the reconstruction of the consonants of Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar, though there have been to date no published applications of the comparative method to the vowels of this language family. In this paper, I present recurrent sound correspondences supporting the reconstruction of at least six vowels: *a, *e, *i, *o, *u, and *?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we revisit the concept of strong differentiability of real functions of one variable, underlying the concept of differentiability. Our discussion is guided by the Straddle Lemma, which plays a key role in this context. The proofs of the results presented are designed to meet a young audience in mathematics, typical of students in a first course of Real Analysis or an honors-level Calculus course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their central role in question formation, content interrogatives in spontaneous conversation remain relatively under-explored cross-linguistically. This paper outlines the structure of ‘where’ expressions in Duna, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, and examines where-questions in a small Duna data set in terms of their frequency, function, and the responses they elicit. Questions that ask ‘where?’ have been identified as a useful tool in studying the language of space and place, and, in the Duna case and elsewhere, show high frequency and functional flexibility. Although where-questions formulate place as an information gap, they are not always answered through direct reference to canonical places. While some question types may be especially “socially costly” (Levinson 2012), asking ‘where’ perhaps provides a relatively innocuous way of bringing a particular event or situation into focus.

This paper describes the complex tense and aspect morphology in Nama, a previously undocumented Papuan language of southern New Guinea. Tense/aspect suffixes followed by agent/actor referencing suffixes occur in combination with one of two sets of patient referencing prefixes. Most of the tense/aspect suffixes mark two possible tenses, and the choice of a prefix from a particular set determines the appropriate interpretation. The distinction between imperfective and perfective aspect is central to the Nama tense/aspect system, and the forms of the perfectivity markers depend on the number category of the grammatical arguments: dual versus non-dual, which encompasses both singular and plural (i.e. more than two). At the same time, the agent/actor suffixes and patient referencing prefixes generally index two different number categories: singular versus non-singular. Each of the two basic aspects has three different tenses, with some other aspectual distinctions occurring only with singular arguments. A combination of imperfective and perfective marking is also used.

Nen (ISO 639–3 code: nqn) is the easternmost language of the Yam (Morehead-Maro) family of Southern New Guinea. This family is one of over forty maximal genetic groupings in New Guinea, and is currently not relatable to any other language family in New Guinea or elsewhere. As with other aspects of their grammar, the phonology of the Morehead-Maro languages differs significantly from those of other Papuan languages. The phonology of Nen is broadly similar to that of other members of the family, except that (like most other members of the Nambu branch, of which it is a member) it lacks the velar nasal phoneme found in more westerly languages, and it has a smaller fricative inventory: other languages of the family include /ɸɣ θ/, all absent from Nen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the currently accepted view about the origins of grammatical change that has occurred in Austronesian languages in contact with Papuan languages in Melanesia. The view is that this change is the result of Austronesian speakers' bilingualism in a Papuan language, and therefore that Austronesian speakers were the agents of change. The article presents an alternative scenario--that the grammatical change may have been the result of a process involved in acquisition of the Austronesian language by Papuan speakers, who then would have been the agents of change. This scenario is supported by a description of similarities in the changed grammatical features of the Austronesian languages and those of contact languages, which clearly did arise from a process of acquisition--namely, language transfer. It is also supported by the degree of lexical borrowing in at least one of the changed Austronesian languages, Takia, which suggests acquisition rather than bilingualism played a key role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages belonging to the Northwest Solomonic (NWS) subgroup, within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, are spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and in the western Solomon Islands. These languages are lexically the most innovative Austronesian languages, retaining the least number of Austronesian cognates. Certain languages also show atypical grammatical structures. These innovative features are typically assumed to be the result of linguistic contact with the Papuan languages of the region. However, until Evans and Palmer's research on Mono-Torau and Uruava, research into contact-induced change had been carried out in other areas of Melanesia, but little was known about contact-induced change in NWS. Mono-Torau and Uruava display right-headed structures, including SOV clauses, postpositions and preposed possessors; these structures differ from other NWS structures and Evans and Palmer argue that this variation arose through Mono, Torau and Uruava speakers' social contact with speakers of neighbouring Papuan languages, thus reflecting contact-induced change. Recent fieldwork reveals that Mono-Torau and Uruava are not the only NWS languages to exhibit such atypical grammatical features. Papapana, a highly endangered language spoken in northern Bougainville, also displays right-headed structures including verb-final clause orders, a postposition and preposed possessors. I argue that, as with Mono-Torau and Uruava, these differences reflect contact-induced change resulting from social contact with speakers of neighbouring Papuan languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates pluractionality in Ranmo, an understudied, underdocumented Papuan (non-Austronesian) language spoken in southwest Papua New Guinea. Based on original fieldwork, this paper brings novel data to bear on the issue of how we delimit the term "pluractional." It has been frequently observed that pluractional verbs denote not just plural events, but also carry the implication of 'many'; however, the relationship between "plurality" and "multiplicity" has not been sufficiently explored in the literature. Ranmo has much to contribute in this area because the two notions correspond to two morphologically distinguishable phenomena: root alternation and -an-suffixation. Based on their interaction, I propose that pluractional predicates involve two semantically distinct components, namely, PL (plural) and DEG (degree) meaning 'a lot'; the latter contributes the 'many' reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages that lack grammatical gender often still index the sex of humans and higher animates through lexical means (Braun 2001). In the Papuan language Nungon, natural sex is indicated lexically, with gendered person and kin terms. Certain person terms may also function as nominal modifiers. Indexation of sex in these person and kin terms is partially dependent on age. The older the speaker or focal person for the kin relationship, the more likely that his/her sex will determine the term chosen to refer to the addressee or secondary person in the kin relationship. Most kin and person terms for small children disregard the sex of the child; such terms instead employ the sex of the focal person to describe the relationship with the child. Unlike with children, there are no completely genderneutral terms for adults, although the dedicated male person terms amna, "man" and ketket, "boy" function in certain contexts with generic reference, meaning "human" and "youth." Generic application of amna, "man" relates to syntax: amna as object argument of deverbal participle expressions has generic reference, as does amna under negation. Thus, indexation of sex is seen to be partially dependent (per Aikhenvald & Dixon 1998) on negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages of the world have genders, that is, grammatical agreement classes, based on such core semantic properties as animacy, sex and humanness, and also shape. In Manambu, a language of New Guinea, nouns are assigned genders according to the sex of a human referent, and to shape and size of any other referent. Men are assigned to the masculine, and women to the feminine gender. A long tube and a large house are masculine, and a round plate and a small house are feminine. Switching gender for humans has pejorative overtones: an unusually boisterous or bossy woman can be treated as masculine, and a squat fattish man who does not display fully masculine behaviour as feminine. Classifying humans by their shape and size implies downgrading them to the level of inanimates. Gender switch also reflects social stereotypes. Feminine gender is functionally unmarked for non-humans, but not for humans. The noun du, "man" can be used as a generic term for "human being." Linguistic Gender of humans in Manambu unequivocally reflects Social Gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Solomon Islands, four Papuan languages are spoken: Savosavo, Touo, Lavukaleve, and Bilua. Some scholars, namely Todd and Ross, have tried to prove that these languages are genetically related through the comparison of pronouns and other morphemes, such as object and subject affixes. Although a similarity in the pronominal forms has been identified, the low number of lexical similarities has not allowed a definitive conclusion on the existence of the family. In this paper, the pronouns and all other morphemes that carry information on gender, person, or number in each language are compared in order to identify recurrent forms carrying identical gender, person, or number information. These recurring forms are used to perform internal reconstructions in each language, which in turn are used to propose a reconstruction of some pronouns of the putative protolanguage and a family tree. The comparison among the four languages leads to the identification of an identical syncretism in clusivity between first person inclusive and second person nonsingular morphemes, which is expressed with the same form in the four languages. This syncretism, together with the very similar first and second person pronominal paradigms, are adduced as new arguments in favor of the existence of a Central Solomons family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clause chaining in Papuan languages is a keystone of the literature on switch-reference (Haiman & Munro 1983, Stirling 1993). Canonically, a clause chain is considered to comprise one or more 'medial' clauses, followed by a single 'final' clause. In Nungon and other Papuan languages, canonical clause chains coexist with non-canonical clause chains, which either feature medial clauses postposed after the final clause, or lack a final clause altogether. I examine the functions of noncanonical medial clauses in Nungon and other Papuan languages in a first attempt at a typology of these uses, given scanty data. Non-canonical medial clauses are argued to represent canny use of the features of clause chains and switch-reference systems to convey meaning efficiently. The exposition also solves an outstanding puzzle of the Amele switch-reference system (Roberts 1988, Stirling 1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new family of Papuan languages. The Anim languages are spread across the lowlands of south New Guinea on both sides of the border between Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian Province of Papua. They share a system of four genders that manifest themselves in adjective agreement and in the demonstratives. Two demonstratives can be reconstructed. The demonstrative *tV 'that' has the gender forms *te (masculine singular), *tu (feminine singular), *ti (plural masculine and feminine), *to/*ta (neuter 1), and *ti (neuter 2). We also reconstruct a singulative suffix and the pronominal object prefixes of the verb. Most Anim languages are only sparsely documented, and much of our data come from survey word lists. We present 44 sets of Anim lexical cognates, including both nouns and verbs. In combination with the fuller lexical evidence for the four subfamilies, this allows positing regular sound correspondences for 13 of the 17 Anim languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages, terms denoting the human body and its parts constitute a closed subclass of nouns with special grammatical properties. Many if not all parts of the human body may acquire dimensions of meanings with ethnographic importance. I focus on a tri-partite division of visible and invisible parts of a human and their attributes in Manambu, a Ndu language spoken in the East Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. The trichotomy of 'body' (s∂p), 'mind' (mawul) and 'spirit' (kayik) in Manambu reflects a culturally embedded conceptualization of what a human is. Each of the three taxonomic units has specific grammatical properties. The physical and mental profile of a human being in Manambu (as in many other languages) cannot be appreciated without understanding the grammar. Conversely, a structural analysis of a language is incomplete unless it makes reference to the system of belief and concepts encoded in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguists have been attempting to define the range of locations in which infixes can occur since Ultan's pioneering work in 1975, but to date there has been no unambiguous evidence for infixation after the first syllable, despite previous (now controversial) claims of its existence by Ultan (1975) and Moravcsik (2000), as well as its predicted existence by Yu's Salient Pivot Hypothesis (‘phonological pivots must be salient at the psycholinguistic or phonetic level’) (2003, 2007). Previously examined potential examples are controversial due to restricted patterns and the acceptability of alternative analyses such as a first-vowel pivot or a foot-based pivot (Samuels 2010). In this article, I present strong evidence from fieldwork on Yeri, an endangered Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea, that imperfective and additive morphemes productively occur as infixes after the first syllable of the verb stem, and that a first-vowel or foot-based analysis cannot account for their position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the words and constructions that Koromu speakers (PNG) use to talk about tare 'hurt/pain' and other painful sensations. It also reflects on links to cultural and environmental influences in daily life and key life events, environmental knowledge and traditional health care. Terms such as warike 'be/feel bad', tare 'hurt/pain', perere 'hurt: sting, cut, burn', and kaho 'ache: burn, pierce' are used in different constructions with varying emphases. These constructions are among the most typologically interesting in Koromu grammar. They are related to, but also distinct from, constructions found in other Papuan languages. They include experiencer object constructions, serial verb constructions with the grammaticized valency-increasing verb here/he put, and nominal constructions with, or without, prominent noun-phrase marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The verbal categories of Finisterre-Huon Papuan languages Awara, Ma Manda, Nek, and Nungon are typologically remarkable in several ways. Their tense systems have multiple subdivisions within past and future tenses. Tense is fused with number, but the number system varies depending on tense, with the most number values distinguished in the future tenses. Immediate and delayed imperatives are distinguished, with the immediate imperative implying brusqueness and the delayed imperative implying politeness. Aspect is generally encoded analytically, with auxiliary verb constructions, although some languages mark habitual aspect through a verbal suffix. Surprisingly, medial verbs may mark more aspectual distinctions than final verbs. Finally, although grammatical evidentiality is not widely known to exist in Papuan languages of northeastern New Guinea, non-firsthand evidentiality is found to be entwined with verbal aspect marking in both Awara and Nungon. The four Finisterre-Huon (FH) Papuan languages represented in this volume - Awara, Ma Manda, Nek, and Nungon - bring to light many of the unique typological characteristics of this group of under-described languages. The papers presented here offer a sense of the commonalities and differences found in the verbal inflectional systems of FH languages. This introduction provides general background on FH languages, and summarizes some of the points of convergence and divergence among the languages discussed in this volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how the Nek language of Papua New Guinea expresses non-spatial setting and mood in its verb system. Nek has verbal suffixes for the five tenses; five aspects are formed by auxiliary verbs and three by suffixes. Indicative and imperative/hortatory are the only moods; modality is mainly expressed by modal adverbs. Verbal subclasses are discussed briefly, and so is the status distinction between realis and irrealis, in order to facilitate understanding of the entire Nek verbal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the 'non-spatial setting' (Dixon 2010: 152-155) of Ma Manda, a Finisterre-Huon language of Papua New Guinea - especially the categories of tense, aspect, reality status, and modality. Particularly noteworthy is the multiplicity of morpho-phonological verb classes which interact in unique ways with verbal inflections, the productive use of multi-verb constructions to encode aspectual and modal distinctions, and the diverse functions of the irrealis inflection. Discussion is paired with numerous paradigms and examples in order to be maximally beneficial to linguistic typology, as well as to foster detailed comparison among Finisterre-Huon languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the ways tense, aspect, mood, and modality are marked in the Finisterre-Huon Papuan language Awara. Awara uses verbal suffixes for all of these, as well as employing multi-verb constructions for four aspectual distinctions. Two past tenses, the present tense, and one future tense are marked. Distinguishing between the present tense suffix and the homophonous imperfective aspect suffix is a thorny issue in Awara morphology. The suffixes marking mood and modality belong to two classes of irrealis suffixes, which are similar in form to irrealis suffixes of other Finisterre-Huon languages. Awara is noteworthy for a grammatical distinction between static and dynamic verb classes, realized in different forms of imperfective aspectual suffixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Finisterre-Huon Papuan language Nungon, like related languages, shows fusion of tense marking with number marking. Nungon is remarkable among Finisterre-Huon languages for an aspectual distinction conflated with evidentiality, and for the development of a formally marked realis Remote Future tense inflection with a formally unmarked irrealis counterpart. This paper presents the entire Nungon verbal inflectional system, including tense, aspect, status, subject and object indexing, referent tracking, and evidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proto-Oceanic had a clausal coordinator *ka 'and then', which expressed sequential relations between propositions. Proto-Central-Eastern Oceanic had a future tense marker *i. The present paper provides (further) evidence for reconstructing both *ka and *i. In some languages, the reflex of *ka has developed into a general coordinating conjunction 'and' that does not signal sequentiality. Consideration of the functions of the reflexes of the two protoforms reveals two kinds of links between sequentiality and futurity. First, in some languages the reflexes of *ka and *i cooccur in a word: the future tensemarking forms are based on the sequentiality-marking forms. And second, in some languages the reflex of sequentiality-marking *ka has come to mark future tense (or irrealis or inceptive aspect). Contrary to Reesink's (2005) suggestion, Proto-Oceanic *ka did not have its origin in a Papuan language; in fact, it itself was a reflex of a Proto-Austronesian form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Thurston (1982, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1994) analyzes the history of the languages of the northwest area of New Britain. This history has included much contact among the area's languages, all of which are Oceanic Austronesian with the exception of the Papuan language Anêm. Thurston, however, took the position that all linguistic speciation is brought about by language contact, especially by language shift. In this paper, the comparative method is applied to Thurston's (and others') data to reconstruct a partial history of the languages of the area, exemplifying how the comparative method may be applied in contact situations. Reanalysis of his data shows that a number of his conclusions about the histories of the area's Austronesian languages are wrong, but validates his claim that language shift is manifested in copied specialist vocabulary, a conclusion that is important for historical contact linguistics, as such cases may provide few or no other clues that shift has occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Discourse preferences in Paluai (Austronesian) similar to those of Papuan languages. [•] Both show grammaticalization of demonstrative form into topic marker. [•] Driving forces: culture-specific or universal cognitive constraints? [Copyright &y& Elsevier]