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… read more
Little is certain about the origins of Papuan Malay. The literature offers two opposing viewpoints: one is that Papuan Malay arose out of centuries of Malay use in New Guinea connected with indigenous trade networks centred on Ternate and the North Moluccas, the other is that Papuan Malay arose… read more
Multiple members of the Alor-Pantar group of Papuan languages display a cross-linguistically unusual pattern whereby certain grammatical words in the domain of phasal polarity yield an affirmative statement when standing before the predicate, whereas the occurrence of the same items after the… read more
This chapter draws attention to the arbitrariness of isolate classifications for many Papuan languages. So little is known about the history of the vast majority of Papuan languages that most classifications in the literature are founded neither on significant documentation nor intensive… read more
This chapter examines the appearance of Dutch loanwords in Ternate, a Papuan language spoken on a small volcanic island in the North Moluccas that was at the centre of the clove trade at the time of European arrival in the region. The Dutch maintained a near continuous presence in Ternate from… read more
This paper addresses the issue of isolating word structure and its origins in the Austronesian and Papuan languages of eastern Timor. McWhorter (2007) claims that both groups of languages evidence extensive loss of grammatical complexity as a result of “interrupted transmission” due to… read more
The island of New Guinea, located to the north of Australia, is one of the world’s major centres of early agriculture and plant domestication. At the same time, a large number of the languages of New Guinea and adjacent areas share a common origin and are believed to belong to a single language… read more
This paper presents a comparative description of temperature terms and the constructions in which they occur in two neighbouring Papuan languages. The languages, Kamang and Abui, are closely related members of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family located on the island of Alor in south-eastern Indonesia.… read more
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… read more
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,… read more
