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This paper demonstrates the existence of the Greater West Bomberai family, bringing the Timor–Alor–Pantar language family of the Lesser Sunda islands into a genealogical unit with the Papuan languages of the western part of the Bomberai peninsula in New Guinea. Applying the comparative method to the increasingly available data from these languages, we demonstrate their relatedness on the basis of forty-seven lexical cognate sets with largely regular sound correspondences. Grammatical evidence in the form of pronouns is invoked to further demonstrate the relatedness of these languages. Loans from Austronesian languages have been identified and eliminated from our comparisons. Establishing the family has repercussions for our view of Island Southeast Asian prehistory, entailing the existence of maritime Papuan-language-speaking groups from an early time.

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.

International audience; The physical remains and extensive historical documentation of fortified settlements across a large swathe of southern Maluku has gone unnoticed by scholars. On the basis of historical accounts and images, I have constructed a detailed picture of the ‘southern Maluku village fortification pattern’ which was once typical of settlements in the region. Using evidence from language, I show that stone building was an indigenous tradition in the southeastern corner of Indonesia which subsequently was extended to stone fortifications around villages, which spread across southern Maluku. I suggest that the fortification of settlements was triggered here in the first half of 17th century by a climate of fear arising from the 1621 Banda massacre perpetuated by the Dutch.

This paper looks at the expression of negation in Waima’ausing the DoBeS corpus of the language.

Alorese is a prime example of a morphologically isolating language. This paper traces the process of morphological simplification it has undergone by addressing the following questions: (i) What was the morphological profile of its ancestor, pre-Alorese? (ii) When did Alorese start to lose its morphology? (iii) Which factors caused this loss? By comparing the morphological profile of current Alorese with its sister language, Lewoingu-Lamaholot, I conclude that the morphology of pre-Alorese was at least as complex as current Lewoingu-Lamaholot. Pre-Alorese underwent a process of drastic and swift morphological loss after its speakers migrated to Pantar island around 1300 AD. Pre-Alorese must have had a significant proportion of adult second language speakers who acquired it imperfectly, thus causing its morphology to be lost. Thus, this is a good example of morphological simplification due to imperfect adult learning in a small scale language variety

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.

This squib highlights difficulties with the reconstruction of a system of stress based on moraic trochees in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar recently presented by Heston. Examination of a wider set of data from the Alor-Pantar languages shows that there are numerous etyma whose synchronic behavior in terms of consonant gemination and stress placement cannot be accounted for by the proposed system. Instead, it is necessary to recognize the presence of phonemic stress placement at least in ProtoAlor-Pantar and likely in Proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar.

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.

Using a sample of 116 languages, this article investigates the typology of comparative constructions and their distribution in Melanesia, one of the world’s least-understood linguistic areas. We present a rigorous definition of a comparative construction as a “comparative concept”, thereby excluding many constructions which have been considered functionally comparatives in Melanesia. Conjoined comparatives are shown to dominate at the core of the area on the island of New Guinea, while (monoclausal) exceed comparatives are found in the maritime regions around New Guinea. Outside of Melanesia adpositional and other comparative constructions including particle comparatives are most frequent in Austronesian languages. The unity of the conjoined comparative type in the core Melanesian area illustrates that, while morpho-syntactic profiles of Melanesian languages are heterogenous, significant convergence in the “ways of saying things” can be found across the region. Additionally, we find no cases of clause chaining constructions being used for encoding comparatives, even in canonical clause chaining languages of central New Guinea. Our findings thus offer no support for Stassen’s claim of a correlation between temporal chaining type and comparative construction type. Instead we suggest that an areal preference for mini-clauses may explain the dominance of the conjoined comparative in Melanesia.

The Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) language family has a special place in South-East Asian linguistics; its members make up the western extreme of the Papuan language sphere. Along with an exhaustive bibliography of works on the TAP languages, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the ongoing documentation of the TAP language family in terms of both linguistic description and (pre-)historical reconstruction. The paper concludes with a consideration of the prospects for future studies of the TAP languages.

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

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.

We examine the role of referential properties and lexical stipulation in three closely related languages of eastern Indonesia, the Alor-Pantar languages Abui, Kamang, and Teiwa. Our focus is on the continuum along which event properties (e.g. volitionality, affectedness) are highly important at one extreme or play virtually no role at the other. These languages occupy different points along this continuum. In Abui, event semantics play the greatest role, while in Teiwa they play the smallest role (the lexical property animacy being dominant in the formation of verb classes). Kamang occupies an intermediate position. Teiwa has conventionalised the relation between a verb and its class along the lines of animacy so that classes become associated with the animacy value of the objects with which the verbs in a given class typically occur. Paying attention to a lexical property like animacy, in contrast with event properties, has meant greater potential for arbitrary classes to emerge.

In this paper, we seek to draw attention to Malayo-Polynesian languages outside of the Oceanic subgroup with innovative bases and complex numerals involving various additive, subtractive, and multiplicative procedures. We highlight the fact that the number of languages showing such innovations is more than previously recognized in the literature. Finally, we observe that the concentration of complex numeral innovations in the region of eastern Indonesia suggests Papuan influence, either through contact or substrate. However, we also note that sociocultural factors, in the form of numeral taboos and conventionalized counting practices, may have played a role in driving innovations in numerals.