Volume 2 brings together four new sketches of Timor-Alor-Pantar languages. Each sketch is written by specialist linguists on the basis of their own original field work conducted in the last decade. The languages show significant grammatical variation which will be of great interest to typologists and historical linguists. A substantial introduction orients the reader in the major issues, both historical and typological, of TAP linguistics.
Volume 2 brings together four new sketches of Timor-Alor-Pantar languages. Each sketch is written by specialist linguists on the basis of their own original field work conducted in the last decade. The languages show significant grammatical variation which will be of great interest to typologists and historical linguists. A substantial introduction orients the reader in the major issues, both historical and typological, of TAP linguistics.
These volumes present sketches of the Papuan languages scattered over the islands of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Together they give an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the unique and diverse grammars of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages, a family of 'Papuan outliers' located at the western perimeter of Melanesia. While largely undescribed until recently, the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages are now among the most intensively studied Papuan families. In this third volume, five new sketches of members of the family are presented, all written by specialist linguists on the basis of original field work.
This volume provides descriptive sketches of the Papuan languages scattered over the islands of Timor, Alor, and Pantar at the western perimeter of Melanesia. Timor-Alor-Pantar languages are a group of related "Papuan outliers," which until recently were largely undocumented. This book provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the unique and diverse grammars of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages.
The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Pa\-puan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern Indonesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and are under pressure from the local Malay variety as well as the national language, Indonesian. This volume studies the internal and external linguistic history of this interesting group, and showcases some of its unique typological features, such as the preference to index the transitive patient-like argument on the verb but not the agent-like one; the extreme variety in morphological alignment patterns; the use of plural number words; the existence of quinary numeral systems; the elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component; and the great variation exhibited in their kinship systems. Unlike many other Papuan languages, Alor-Pantar languages do not exhibit clause-chaining, do not have switch reference systems, never suffix subject indexes to verbs, do not mark gender, but do encode clusivity in their pronominal systems. Indeed, apart from a broadly similar head-final syntactic profile, there is little else that the Alor-Pantar languages share with Papuan languages spoken in other regions. While all of them show some traces of contact with Austronesian languages, in general, borrowing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact with Malay and Indonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of the Alor-Pantar region. This is the second edition of the volume that was originally published in 2014. In this edition, typographical errors have been corrected, small textual improvements have been implemented, broken URL links repaired or removed, and references updated. The overall content of the chapters has not been changed.
From 1963 to 2011 Pacific Linguistics, located at the Australian National University, published over six hundred books concerned with the languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia. The Mouton Pacific Linguistics series represents a continuation of this publishing venture under the same Editorial Board. The Pacific Linguistics series presents linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, and other materials concerned with languages of this region. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world, and its publications are refereed by international scholars with relevant expertise. Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on the languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas, read by scholars with an interest in the region as well as by linguists with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history. Pacific Linguistics is proud to act as a vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge about the languages of the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, many of which are little known, and to bring them to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.
This is a comprehensive grammar of the Papuan language Bunaq as spoken in the district of Lamaknen. Bunaq belongs to the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family, which comprises the westernmost Papuan languages. Surrounded on all sides by Austronesian languages, Bunaq has developed in isolation from other members of the family, and as a result shows a range of unique morphosyntactic patterns. This grammar provides a detailed synchronic description of Bunaq based on a functional-typological approach. Following additional fieldwork and containing new material and analyses, this book is a thoroughly revised version of the author’s 2010 PhD thesis, which won the Pāṇini Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology.
This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes converge and differ across languages and language areas. Chapters systemically explore these processes languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages, revealing a number of unique pathways as well as shared features.
The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of all major regions of the world. The island of New Guinea and its offshore islands is arguably the most diverse and least documented linguistic hotspot in the world - home to over 1300 languages, almost one fifth of all living languages, in more than 40 separate families, along with numerous isolates. Traditionally one of the least understood linguistic regions, ongoing research allows for the first time a comprehensive guide. Given the vastness of the region and limited previous overviews, this volume focuses on an account of the families and major languages of each area within the region, including brief grammatical descriptions of many of the languages. The volume also includes a typological overview of Papuan languages, and a chapter on Austronesian-Papuan contact. It will make accessible current knowledge on this complex region, and will be the standard reference on the region. It is aimed at typologists, endangered language specialists, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and all those interested in linguistic diversity and understanding this least known linguistic region.
While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM.
