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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.

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.

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.

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.

This article explores discourse practices in Paluai (Admiralties, Oceanic, Austronesian), spoken on Baluan Island (Manus Province, Papua New Guinea), comparing similarities and differences with discourse practices in Papuan languages (see e.g. de Vries, 1995, de Vries, 2005 and de Vries, 2006). Many Papuan languages exhibit discourse practices which cross genetic boundaries: 'distributive', 'thematizing' and 'recapulative' strategies, which may lead to a high frequency of certain expression types and ultimately to grammaticalization. These practices have been described for several genetically unrelated Papuan languages, and they can be regarded as an areal feature of the region. Although these strategies are not unique to Papuan languages, their frequency distinguishes this region from others. Thematization is a strategy used in particular at the beginning of a narrative. Like in many Papuan languages, certain Paluai demonstratives are used as markers of topicality and/or definiteness. Distributive strategies with only one modifier per head are preferred, and thus verbs typically have one full nominal argument and nouns one modifier. Recapitulative strategies, predominantly tail–head linkage, are very common too. This raises the question whether the features encountered in Paluai are also frequent in other non-Papuan languages across New Guinea.

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 tense-marking 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.

Fataluku is an underdocumented Papuan language spoken by approximately 37,000 individuals in East Timor, a nation in island Southeast Asia. After providing some background information on the phonology of Fataluku, this paper discusses the presence and phonological representations of surface long vowels and diphthongs. The evidence shows that vowel length is indeed contrastive, but both long vowels and diphthongs are represented underlyingly as sequences of vowels rather than as true unit phonemes.

Speakers of many Trans New Guinea or Papuan languages use a number of reciprocal person-referring expressions. Various examples are found in the Papuan language of Koromu, spoken in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. This paper examines the meanings of Koromu reciprocal expressions that recall shared past experiences, in particular, social category terms connected with coming of age events and spontaneous nicknames created at the time events occur in the course of everyday life. The meanings are explicated in clear simple terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage primes. The explications point to important aspects of social cognition, including identification with significant others based on shared experience and relational concepts of personhood. Although this study points to the possibility of some language endangerment for some meanings, it also indicates the ongoing cultural importance of shared experiences, including commensality, in both rites of passage and everyday life.

Despite the ongoing interest in reciprocal situations, which form a central part of our social, intellectual, and moral lives, and the linguistic encoding of such situations in different languages, studies of reciprocals in Papuan languages remain underrepresented in the reciprocal literature. The Trans New Guinea languages Mian, Amele, and Hua have a reciprocal construction in which the reciprocal subevents are expressed by individual transitive verbs plus an existential verb expressing that the reciprocal action is done together. Mian goes one step further and fuses this construction into a single verb with a reciprocal suffix -sese. The present paper is an in-depth analysis of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of reciprocal constructions in Mian, including a comparison with Amele, and an analysis of the diachronic development of the Mian reciprocal, whose origin presumably lies in a biclausal description in which the reciprocal subevents are spelled out separately and sequentially.

The Papuan language Nungon is spoken in four villages of the Uruwa River valley, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, each with its own dialect. Only the Kotet village dialect has a system of birth-order terms, which form a nominal subclass. The Kotet birth-order terms are formally similar to birth-order terms in Papuan languages to the south. Because Kotet was historically oriented southward for trade, the Kotet birth-order terms are postulated to have been borrowed from the south. Every language in the area with birth-order terms, including the Kotet dialect, exhibits differences in the forms of the terms, term recycling within the system, and ordering of the terms. Thus, the specific trajectory by which the birth-order terms reached Kotet village is murky.

Savosavo kinship terminology is remarkable in that it covers fifteen generations, a feature unique in its immediate geographical context, the Solomon Islands, and rare cross-linguistically. The aim of this paper is to present the kinship terminology system of the easternmost Papuan language from both an anthropological and a linguistic perspective, thus providing a comprehensive account of the terms, the system they form, their morphosyntactic and pragmatic features, and how they are used in everyday life. Both consanguineal and affinal kin are considered.

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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.

The historical relations of the Papuan languages scattered across the islands of the Alor archipelago, Timor, and Kisar in southeast Indonesia have remained largely conjectural. This paper makes a first step toward demonstrating that the languages of Alor and Pantar form a single genealogical group. Applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago, we use form-meaning pairings in basic cognate sets to establish regular sound correspondences that support the view that these languages are genetically related. We reconstruct 97 Proto‒Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages in the Trans-New Guinea family. Published version

The focus of this article is a short narrative text that was recorded during the author’s fieldwork on the endangered Papuan language Arapesh. An explication of the text following the principles of Hymesian verse analysis provides a rich source of evidence about the speaker’s experience of cultural transformation as refracted in the research encounter. This comes across explicitly, through the text’s remarkable content, and indexically through aspects of its form. The analysis helps reveal the subtle and sometimes problematic ways in which fieldworkers as cross-cultural interlocutors shape the encounters that are reified in the documentary objects they produce.

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.

Dunn and colleagues (2008) describe and exemplify the use of sophisticated analyses of abstract structural features to reconstruct language histories. The techniques that they use do show some clustering in the groups of languages that they examine; Dunn et al. state that they 'tend to favor a phylogenetic origin for the signal of relatedness' (p. 748), and that the results of their test case 'show a close degree of correspondence to the existing linguistic classification based on sound-meaning correspondences' (p. 747). We argue that a more parsimonious explanation for the results obtained by Dunn et al.'s methodology is that it accurately maps linguistic geography, the network of contact and diffusion that postdates a proto-language, in most cases corresponding to geographic distance.

1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 "ABERRANT" AUSTRONESIAN LANGUAGES OF MELANESIA. The Austronesian languages of the Melanesian region have long been viewed as different iiom those of Micronesia and Polynesia in ways that raise questions regarding their historical development. Grace (1981, 1992, 1996) describes this difference as a continuum from more "aberrant" to more "exemplary" languages, noting the presence of many more aberrant Austronesian languages in Melanesia than in the other two regions of Oceania. By aberrant, Grace (1992, 1996) means a language with which the application of the Comparative Method of historical linguistics yields results that are complex and difficult to interpret. (For discussion of the comparative method, see Rankin 2003 and Harrison 2003.) Grace lists four ways in which languages can be aberrant: (i) they show relatively few cognates with other Austronesian languages; (ii) they are structurally atypical of the Austronesian languages of their subgroup (for example, Oceanic); (iii) they have large phoneme inventories and phonetic features that are atypical of Austronesian languages; and/or (iv) they do not show unambiguous regular sound correspondences, but rather often display multiple sets of contrasting correspondences. Languages with one or more of these features raise the question of what kinds of historical explanations account for their atypical nature. There is continuing debate regarding the histories of these "aberrant" languages in Melanesia (see Pawley 2006). (1) Ross (1988) demonstrated that the application of the Comparative Method to the Austronesian languages of northwestern Melanesia, namely Papua New Guinea and the northwestern Solomon Islands, does in fact yield regular sound correspondences and patterns of shared innovations that indicate phylogenetic relationships among the languages of the region. However, Ross (1988) also notes that these languages are characterized by a high degree of linguistic diversity or, in Grace's (1981) terms, are aberrant with respect to features (i) and (ii). For example, in terms of lexicon, languages of the Northwest Solomonic (henceforth NWS) subgroup are among the most innovative within the Austronesian family. That is, these languages retain proportionally fewer Austronesian etyma than other languages in the family (see Blust 2000, Pawley 2009, Ross 2010). Also, certain languages within this subgroup, in particular the Mono-Uruavan ones, show highly atypical grammatical structures in comparison with other Austronesian languages of the region. There is agreement in the literature that in this northwest region of Melanesia the linguistic diversity reflects histories of contact-induced change, resulting from widespread bilingualism among speakers of Austronesian and Papuan languages (Lynch 1981, Ross 1988, Pawley 2006). Thurston (1982, 1987, 1994) and Ross (1996, 2008) investigate the atypical or aberrant grammatical structures in Austronesian Lusi (West New Britain, Papua New Guinea) and Takia (Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea), respectively. They show that these structures are similar to ones found in neighboring Papuan languages, and that they reflect contact-induced change. Comparable aberrant structures in other Austronesian languages of northwestern Melanesia, including the three Mono-Uruavan languages of the southern Bougainville region, have been presumed to reflect similar processes of contact-induced change. 1.2 LANGUAGES OF THE SOUTHERN BOUGAINVILLE REGION. All of the Austronesian languages of Melanesia east of about 138[degrees] East are part of the large Oceanic branch of the family (see Lynch, Ross, and Crowley 2002). The Oceanic languages of Bougainville, Buka, and Nissan islands in Papua New Guinea, and of the Shortland Islands, Choiseul, Santa Isabel, (2) and New Georgia in the Solomon Islands form the NWS subgroup within Oceanic (Ross 1988). Within NWS, it is the Mono-Uruavan subgroup (Ross 1988) comprising three languages--Mono, Uruava and Torau--that display highly atypical grammatical structures. …

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.

Abstract The contact history of the languages of the Eastern and Western Torres Strait has been claimed (e.g. by Dixon 2002, Wurm 1972, and others) to have been sufficiently intense as to obscure the genetic relationship of the Western Torres Strait language. Some have argued that it is an Australian (Pama-Nyungan) language, though with considerable influence from the Papuan language Meryam Mir (the Eastern Torres Strait language). Others have claimed that the Western Torres language is, in fact, a genetically Papuan language, though with substantial Australian substrate or adstrate influence. Much has been made of phonological structures which have been viewed as unusual for Australian languages. In this paper we examine the evidence for contact claims in the region. We review aspects of the phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of the Eastern and Western Torres Strait languages with an eye to identifying areal influence. This larger data pool shows that the case for intense contact has been vastly overstated. Beyond some phonological features and some loan words, there is no linguistic evidence for intense contact; moreover, the phonological features adduced to be evidence of contact are also found to be not specifically Papuan, but part of a wider set of features in Australian languages.

This paper focuses on optional ergative marking in the Papuan language Ku Waru and the Australian Aboriginal language Bunuba, especially in constructions with verbs of speaking. It addresses two interrelated issues: (i) What semantic and pragmatic factors are associated with the difference between ergative and non-ergative subject marking in languages where this is not strictly determined by whether the verb is grammatically transitive or intransitive; (ii) How are we to understand the grammatical relationship between verbs of speaking and the material they frame? In both languages that material behaves in some respects like a grammatical object. These locutionary objects differ among themselves in the extent to which they stand out as distinct speech events in relation to the framing one, and those differences are correlated with the presence or absence of ergative marking on the subject of the framing verb. I argue that Bunuba and Ku Waru optional ergative marking in this context can be accounted for by an extended version of Hopper and Thompson's notion of object individuation, in which the grammar treats the metalinguistic relationship between reported speech and that which reports it as analogous to that between Patient and Agent in canonical transitive clauses.

Songs and other expressive forms of language may carry meaning at a range of levels. A variety of factors influence the accessibility of these different layers of meaning. This paper explores issues associated with explanation of the meaning (exegesis) of night and day dance songs of the Mali Baining people of Papua New Guinea. We draw a parallel between accessibility of meaning in relation to cultural practices such as dance complexes, and accessibility of linguistic meaning in relation to specific texts, to present a framework for explaining why aspects of meaning or knowledge may remain inaccessible to researchers in cross-cultural settings.

A corpus of 350 naturally-occurring questions in videotaped interaction shows that questions and their responses in Yélî Dnye (the Papuan language of Rossel Island) both conform to clear universal expectations but also have a number of language-specific peculiarities. They conform in that polar and wh-questions are unrelated in form, wh-questions have the usual sort of special forms, and responses show the same priorities as in other languages (for fast cooperative, adequate answers). But, less expected perhaps, Yélî Dnye polar questions (excepting tags) are unmarked in both morphosyntax and prosody, and the responses include conventional facial expressions, conforming to the propositional response system type (so that assent to ‘He didn’t come?’ means ‘no, he didn’t’). These visual signals are facilitated by high levels of mutual gaze making rapid early responses possible. Tags can occur with non-interrogative illocutionary forces, and could be held to perform speech acts of their own. Wh-questions utilize about a dozen wh-forms, which are only optionally fronted, and there are some interesting specializations of forms (e.g. ‘who’ for any named entities other than places). Most questions of all types are genuinely information seeking, with 27% (mostly tags) seeking confirmation, 19% requesting repair.

This paper shows that despite evidence of structural convergence between some of the Austronesian and non-Austronesian (Papuan) languages of Island Melanesia, statistical methods can detect two independent genealogical signals derived from linguistic structural features. Earlier work by the author and others has presented a maximum parsimony analysis which gave evidence for a genealogical connection between the non-Austronesian languages of island Melanesia. Using the same data set, this paper demonstrates for the non-statistician the application of more sophisticated statistical techniques—including Bayesian methods of phylogenetic inference, and shows that the evidence for common ancestry is if anything stronger than originally supposed.

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.

Blust (2005) proposed that certain typological traits in the Austronesian languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia—here called “Remote Melanesia”—suggest Papuan contact influence in situ . Given the absence of any pre-Lapita archaeological tradition in this area, it now seems best to frame this hypothesis in terms of two closely spaced migrations that appear to be archaeologically indistinguishable. The first wave brought Austronesian speakers of southern Mongoloid physical type into Remote Oceania. The second wave brought Papuan speakers who had acquired the outrigger canoe complex, pottery, and some other elements of material culture from the incoming Austronesians in Near Oceania, but who remained biologically and culturally distinct from them in other ways. In time, the Papuan languages of Remote Melanesia were abandoned in favor of the more uniform and widely dispersed speech of late Proto-Oceanic speakers, but not before leaving traces of their former presence in the form of typological divergence toward a pattern that is more typical of Papuan languages than of Austronesian languages outside Melanesia.

Makalero is a non-Austronesian/Papuan language spoken in East Timor. Its profile is largely isolating, the basic SOV word order being crucial in determining the grammatical relations of the uninflected word forms. Yet there is a small class of transitive verbs which acquire a prefix when the direct object is a third person. This allows a certain amount of flexibility in word order. A formally identical prefix also occurs with some other verb classes; its function is not yet well understood in those cases, although it seems to be connected to transitivity, possibly reflecting an old applicative. This article is based on work in progress and presents preliminary findings on what seems to be a transitivising strategy in Makalero.

Each language has its own limited inventory of constructions from which speakers have to choose when they want to communicate their conceptualizations. This paper discusses a highly productive complex figure construction (Croft 2001:326) in the Papuan language Moi, which requires a number of different translations in English. In both SVO and SOV Papuan languages perceived events are normally expressed in coordinating complex figure constructions, but can appear in figure-ground constructions when pragmatically marked. To capture the genius of a language, interlinear and free translations in descriptive grammars should signal the language-specific links between form and meaning. The conclusion discusses to what extent and under what conditions cross-linguistic comparison of emic constructions is possible.

Using various methods derived from evolutionary biology, including maximum parsimony and Bayesian phylogenetic analysis, we tackle the question of the relationships among a group of Papuan isolate languages that have hitherto resisted accepted attempts at demonstration of interrelatedness. Instead of using existing vocabulary-based methods, which cannot be applied to these languages due to the paucity of shared lexemes, we created a database of STRUCTURAL FEATURES — abstract phonological and grammatical features apart from their form. The methods are first tested on the closely related Oceanic languages spoken in the same region as the Papuan languages in question. We find that using biological methods on structural features can recapitulate the results of the comparative method tree for the Oceanic languages, thus showing that structural features can be a valid way of extracting linguistic history. Application of the same methods to the otherwise unrelatable Papuan languages is therefore likely to be similarly valid. Because languages that have been in contact for protracted periods may also converge, we outline additional methods for distinguishing convergence from inherited relatedness. Full text after 2-year embargo. PAVA

Recent research has shown that the long-standing assumption that the Reefs-Santa Cruz languages have a non-Austronesian substrate is unlikely to be valid: the languages do show regular sound correspondences with Proto-Oceanic (Ross and Naess 2007), and the alleged noun classes cannot felicitously be analyzed as such (Naess 2006). This paper addresses the third argument given in previous work for a non-Austronesian substrate: the complex verb structures. Presenting data from both Natugu (Northern Santa Cruz) and Aiwoo (Reefs), we show that while some of the verb morphology has clear cognates in Proto-Oceanic, other parts can be understood as deriving from an earlier productive process of verb serialization followed by reduction of the forms found in such serialized constructions. Given that both verb serialization and grammaticalization of elements of serializing constructions are well known in Oceanic languages, this leaves no linguistic evidence for a non-Austronesian substrate in Reefs-Santa Cruz. 1. INTRODUCTION. The considerable complexity of verb structure in the Reefs-Santa Cruz (RSC) languages has been taken to indicate that the languages are of non-Austronesian origin. The languages of Santa Cruz in particular show a striking complexity in the verb, with a wide array of possible elements being combined into a single inflected verb form, though even in Aiwoo (Reefs), where the system is rather simpler, long and complex verb forms are by no means unusual. For example: (1) (1) NATUGU Na-yapwa-ti-pa-epwa-ngo-be-me-le ba-do. IRR-tell-TR-out-true-APPL-hither-2MIN.SBJ-3MIN.O DAT-3AUG 'You should truly proclaim it to them.' (2) AIWOO Ba li-po-to-ute-ma-da=gu. NEG 3AUG.S-go-go.in-again.ITR-DIR:1-any=NEG 'None of them came back.' Wurm (1985:964) claims that these verb structures "show formal and functional agreements with verb systems in Papuan languages spoken further west" and argues that the presence of Austronesian morphological elements in what he sees as a fundamentally un-Austronesian verb structure indicates a non-Austronesian substrate with considerable borrowing from one or more Austronesian languages. This is one of three arguments that have been advanced for a non-Austronesian origin of the RSC languages; the other two are the lack of identifiable regular sound correspondences with other Austronesian languages (Wurm 1970 and later publications) and the alleged presence of one or more noun class systems in the RSC languages (Wurm 1981). Recent research, however, has questioned the validity of the latter two arguments. Naess (2006) shows that what have been called "noun classes" in Aiwoo (Reefs) are in fact better described partly as a system of nominalizing prefixes to verbs, partly as resulting from the fact that nouns lose their reflex of the Austronesian article *na in compounds. Ross and Naess (2007) show that regular sound correspondences can indeed be established, and suggest that the RSC languages together with the languages of nearby Utupua and Vanikoro form a first-order subgroup of Oceanic. This supports the claim made by La Fontinelle (1974) and Lincoln (1978) that the RSC languages are in fact of pure Oceanic origin, as well as matching the results of archaeological investigations that show very early Lapita settlement in the Reefs-Santa Cruz area. (The Lapita cultural complex is assumed to be associated with the Austronesian expansion.) In this paper we will address the third property that has been claimed to indicate a non-Austronesian origin for the RSC languages: their complex verb structures. We will show that a large proportion of this complexity can be accounted for by an analysis that assumes many of the bound morphemes in RSC verbs to have arisen from the gradual grammaticalization of serial verb constructions. Such constructions--and grammaticalized structures based on them--are common throughout the Oceanic family, and therefore the complex verb structures of Reefs-Santa Cruz cannot be seen as an argument that the languages have a non-Austronesian origin. …

This paper explores the relationship between language and cultural practice in the Fataluku language community of East Timor. A Papuan language and member of what is referred to as the Trans New Guinea Phylum (TNGP) of languages, Fataluku society nevertheless exhibits many cultural ideas and practices suggesting a long period of engagement and accommodation to Austronesian cosmopolitanism. The idea that Fataluku speakers are ‘Austronesians in disguise’ points to the significance of cultural hybridity on the Austronesian boundary.

I present data from Tambora, a now extinct language of central Sumbawa, and argue from the lexical data and the inferred phonology, compared with areal norms, that it was a Papuan language spoken by a trading population of southern Indonesia. The existence into historical times of a large and nonreclusive Papuan political entity this far west forces a major revision of our ideas about the linguistic macrohistory of Eastern Indonesia.

This thesis propose a study of different strategies to construct subordinate clauses in Australian and Papuan languages. These two language groups, rarely found in typological studies on the subject, show some unusual morphosyntactic constructions. This study is based on ten languages: four Australian languages (Nyangumarta, Martuthunira, Wambaya and Kayardild), and six Papuan languages (Maybrat, Yimas, Manambu, Mian, Amele and Hua). Following a brief grammatical overview of these languages, the thesis examine six types of subordinate clause strategies to identify their functions and uses: subordinate clauses without segmental marking, with a conjunction, with case marking, with a specific verbal form, with a switch-reference system and with the relativization strategy. The last chapter is focused on the specific situation of complementation strategies with perception verbs. This thesis aims to illustrate how subordinate clauses function in those languages, but it also aims to show how these languages may help to re-examine general linguistic theories., Cette thèse propose une étude des différentes stratégies mises en place pour former des propositions subordonnées dans les langues australiennes et papoues. Ces deux groupes de langues, rarement présents dans les études typologiques sur le sujet, présentent certaines constructions morphosyntaxiques peu fréquentes dans les langues du monde. Cette étude se base sur une dizaine de langues : quatre langues australiennes (le nyangumarta, le martuthunira, le wambaya et le kayardild) et six langues papoues (le maybrat, le yimas, le manambu, le mian, l'amele et le hua). Après une brève présentation grammaticale de ces langues, la thèse analyse six types de stratégies de subordination pour en déterminer les fonctions et les types d'emploi : la subordination sans marque, avec une conjonction, avec le marquage casuel, avec une forme verbale spécifique, avec un système de "switch-reference" et par la relativisation. Un dernier chapitre s'intéresse au cas particulier de la complémentation des verbes de perception. Cette thèse a pour but d'illustrer le fonctionnement de ces langues dans le domaine de la subordination, mais également, dans une dimension typologique, de montrer comment ces langues peuvent aider à repenser les théories linguistiques générales.

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.

Historical linguistics is a key witness in reconstructing the prehistory of Oceania. The extraordinary number of Papuan (non-Austronesian) language families in Near Oceania is consistent with archaeological evidence that this region was settled over 40,000 years ago. One family, Trans New Guinea, is exceptional in its wide distribution, suggesting that its expansion was underpinned by technological advances. Most Austronesian languages of Oceania fall into a single branch of the family, Oceanic, indicating that they stem from a bottleneck in the Austronesian expansion into the southwest Pacific, associated with the formation of Proto Oceanic (POc). The final stages of this formative period almost certainly took place in the Bismarck Archipelago and the subsequent rapid dispersal of Oceanic languages across the southwest Pacific can be connected with the region's colonization by bearers of the Lapita archaeological culture. The reconstructed lexicon of POc provides information about early Lapita material culture and social organization.

‘Mixed’ or ‘top and second’ number systems (Dixon 2012:52, Corbett 2000:120-121), in which different number systems occur in different parts of a language’s grammar, are not unusual in Papuan languages. The Animacy Hierarchy (Corbett 2000:56; Smith‑Stark 1974) dictates that if a grammar involves more than one number system, the system that includes more number distinctions should function higher on the hierarchy (Corbett 2000:121). Papuan languages of the Finisterre branch of the Finisterre-Huon language group (Madang and Morobe Provinces, Papua New Guinea) are unusual in that number system splits may be found, not only along the Animacy Hierarchy, but between different sets of pronouns, and even between different verbal tense markings. This paper describes the number system splits in the Finisterre Papuan language Nungon and gives historical explanations for the splits between pronoun sets and some of the splits between tenses.

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.

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The present study investigates the gender systems of 20 languages in the New Guinea region, an often overlooked area in typological research. The languages were classified with five criteria used by Di Garbo (2014) to classify gender systems of African languages. The results showed that the gender systems were diverse, although around half of the languages have two-gendered sex-based systems with semantic assignment, more than four gender-indexing targets, and no gender marking on nouns. The gender systems of New Guinea are remarkably representative of the world, although formal assignment is much less common. However, the gender systems of New Guinea and Africa are very different. The most significant difference isthe prevalence of non-sex-based gender systems and gender marking on nouns in Africa, whereas the opposite is true in New Guinea. However, gender in Africa is also less diverse largely due to the numerous Bantu languages. Finally, four typologically rare characteristics were found in the sample: (1) size and shape as important criteria of gender assignment, with large/long being masculine and small/short feminine, (2) the presence of two separate nominal classification systems, (3) no gender distinctions in pronouns, and (4) verbs as the most common indexing target. Denna studie undersöker genussystemen hos 20 språk i Nya Guinea-regionen, vilken ofta förbises i typologisk forskning. Språken klassificerades utifrån fem kriterier som användes av Di Garbo (2014) för att klassificera genussystem i Afrika. Resultaten visade att genussystemen var varierade, men ungefär hälften av språken har könsbaserade genussystem med tvaå genus, semantisk genustilldelning, fler än fyra genusindex och ingen genusmarkering på substantiv. Genussystemen är anmärkningsvärt representativa för världen, men formell genustilldelning är mycket mindre vanlig. Jämfört med genussystemen i Afrika är dock Nya Guinea väldigt annorlunda. Den viktigaste skillnaden är den större utbredningen av icke-könsbaserade genussystem och genusmarkering på substantiv i Afrika, medan motsatsen gäller i Nya Guinea. Genus i Afrika är dock till stor del mindre varierat på grund av de talrika bantuspråken. Slutligen hittades fyra typologiskt sällsynta karaktärsdrag i urvalet: (1) storlek och form som viktiga kriterier för genustilldelning, där stort/långt är maskulint och litet/kort feminint, (2) närvaron av två separata nominalklassificeringssystem, (3) inga genusdistinktioner i pronomen och (4) verb som det vanligaste genusindexet.

Papuan speech communities in New Guinea share a number of specific discourse preferences that are used in similar ways in certain genres. This article focuses on three discourse practices as they operate in narrative texts; thematization (a strong preference for Theme, Predication or Left Dislocation constructions), distribution (a strong preference to distribute nominals over series of clauses and of modifiers over series of phrases) and recapitulative linkage (connecting clause chains or sentences by tail-head linkage). Thematization occurs especially in discourse initial paragraphs when the time, place, participant and main themes are introduced, and in discourse final paragraphs with summarizing and concluding functions. Thematization combines with non-distributive forms in these contexts to form discourse units in which the number and complexity of nominal phrases is relatively high. Such thematic parts are not organized around progression of events and recapitulative linkage is hardly present. Once the story is underway, distributive tendencies become more dominant, with unmarked, chained forms of recapitulative linkage connecting the often lengthy and 'verby' sentences into chaining paragraphs. When marked, thematized recapitulative linkage occurs, this signals thematic discontinuity. Many aspects of the typology of Papuan languages, from demonstrative topic markers to experiential, subordinate and perception complement constructions, can be understood from the perspective of these areal discourse preferences of Papuan speakers. But the identification of these areal pragmatic patterns not only enhances our understanding of the specific nature of Papuan languages, it also has crucial methodological implications for the way field linguists transcribe and analyse whole texts or single expressions from these languages. Ignoring these discourse practices may lead to serious distortions in the transcription and collection of data and in the grammatical description of these languages. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper looks at the processes involved in the genesis of three pidgins of New Guinea. I will argue that the main principle at work in the formation of the morphosyntax of pidgins is a general human capacity for language simplification, but that these processes of simplification are subject both to the effects of specific linguistic features in the local multilingual contact situation that gives rise to the pidgin and to constraints resulting from a universal linguistic endowment. By a comparative look across a range of morphosyntactic features at the processes of simplification that produced three unrelated pidgins of New Guinea, Yimas Pidgin, Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin, the article exemplifies some of the types of structures that can result in pidgins from this general human capacity for language simplification, sifted through both local conditions and universal constraints.

This paper explores body part terms in Lavukaleve, a Papuan isolate spoken in the Solomon Islands. The full set of body part terms collected so far is presented, and their grammatical properties are explained. It is argued that Lavukaleve body part terms do not enter into partonomic relations with each other, and that a hierarchical structure of body part terms does not apply for Lavukaleve. It is shown too that some universal claims which have been made about the expression of terms relating to limbs are contradicted in Lavukaleve, which has only one general term covering arm, hand, leg and (for some people) foot.

This paper discusses properties of body part nomenclature in Tidore. As well as a number of simplex terms that refer to parts of the body, Tidore also has a considerable number of complex terms. Some problems relating to the identification of terms as ‘simplex’ are discussed and it is shown that at least one named part of the body, yohu ‘leg/foot’, does not correspond to a perceptually ‘given’, natural part of the body since it does not include the upper part of the thigh. Inherent possessor terms allow for a lexicalisation-based hierarchy of the human body. It is uncertain, however, whether this partonomy also reflects the conceptualisation of the body and its parts in Tidore. Elicitation of data that do not directly rely on the lexicalisation of partonomic relations may reveal an additional partonomy.