The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology (Second edition)

The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan (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

Reality Status in Teiwa (Papuan)

Wetensch. publicati

The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology

The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan (Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern In- donesia. 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 lan- guage, 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 morphologi- cal 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 ex- hibit 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, borrow- ing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact with Malay and Indonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of the Alor-Pantar region

What is “natural” speech? Comparing free narratives and Frog stories in Indonesia

While there is overall consensus that narratives obtained by means of visual stimuli contain less natural language than free narratives, it has been less clear how the naturalness of a narrative can be measured in a crosslinguistically meaningful way. Here this question is addressed by studying the differences between free narratives and narratives elicited using the Frog story in two languages of eastern Indonesia, Alorese (Austronesian) and Teiwa (Papuan). Both these languages are not commonly written, and belong to families that are typologically distinct. We compare eight speakers telling free narratives and Frog stories, investigating the lexical density (noun-pronoun ratio, noun-clause ratio, noun-verb ratio), narrative style (the use of direct speech reports and tail-head linkage), as well as speech rate. We find significant differences between free and prompted narratives along these three dimensions, and suggest that they can be used to measure the naturalness of speech in oral narratives more generally.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

The semantics of semantic alignment in eastern Indonesia

Niet-projectgebonden publicaties talen en culturen van Zuidoost-Azi

How report verbs become quote markers and complementisers

Niet-projectgebonden publicaties talen en culturen van Zuidoost-Azi

One item, many faces: ‘Come’ in Teiwa and Kaera

Asian Studie

The Use of Language Data in Comparative Research: A Note on Blust (2008) and Onvlee (1984)

Asian Studie

Language as a time machine

Inaugural lecture on the acceptance of her position as professor in Austronesian en Papuan Linguistics at Leiden University on Friday 6 february 2015Language Use in Past and Presen

Split S in the Indonesian Area: Forms, Semantics, Geography

Language Use in Past and Presen