Crossing the Border Historical and Linguistic Divides Among the Bunaq in Central Timor

The Bunaq are a Papuan language-speaking people straddling the border of Indonesian West Timor and independent East Timor. This paper looks at the history of the Bunaq as a “border“ people in Timor. “Border“ is interpreted here in two ways, as referring to: (i) a political division, the boundary line separating one country from another, and (ii) a linguistic division, the distinguishing line between Papuan and Austronesian languages. I examine the effect that the Bunaq position at the political and linguistic borders of Timor has had on the people and their language

Wallacea, a Linguistic Area

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.La Wallacea comprend des langues de la famille austronésienne et des langues des multiples familles de langues papoues, ou non austronésiennes. On sait depuis longtemps que les langues austronésiennes de la Wallacea dénotent des influences papoues. Certains linguistes ont tenté de définir une Wallacea linguistique (sous d’autres désignations) en fonction de cette hybridité. Le présent article montre cependant que la zone d’influence papoue sur les langues austronésiennes est beaucoup plus étendue que la Wallacea, englobant des régions à l’est et à l’ouest de la Nouvelle-Guinée. Dans cette zone plus vaste, appelée ici Mélanésie linguistique, une aire linguistique wallacéenne plus restreinte peut néanmoins être considérée comme une sous-catégorie définie par un ensemble de traits spécifiques qu’on ne trouve pas ailleurs en Mélanésie linguistique. Il est prouvé que cette Wallacea linguistique résulte d’interactions aux temps préhistoriques entre les migrants austronésiens et une population pré-existante d’agriculteurs et de marins papous, déjà bien établis dans la Wallacea avant l’arrivée des Austronésiens

Elevation in the spatial deictic systems of Alor-Pantar languages

This chapter provides a formal and semantic typology of the highly elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component found in the Alor-Pantar languages. The systems show a high degree of variation both in the number of paradigms of elevation-marked terms as well as in the number of semantic components within the different elevational domains. The chapter further considers the history and reconstructability of an elevational system to proto-Alor-Pantar, observing that the elevation distinction itself is very stable in the deictic systems of the AP languages, but that the terms of the systems are not always stable and that the systems are often subject to elaboration

State-of-the-art in the documentation of the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, Pantar, and Kisar; A bibliography

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.KeywordsDocumentation, Papuan languages, Timor, Alor, Pantar, Kisar

Comparatives in melanesia:Concentric circles of convergence

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 relatedness of Timor-Kisar and Alor-Pantar languages: A preliminary demonstration

The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, Pantar and Kisar have long been thought to be members of a single family. However, their relatedness has not yet been established through the rigorous application of the comparative method. Recent historical work has shown the relatedness of the languages of Alor and Pantar on the one hand (Holton et al. 2012), and those of Timor and Kisar on the other (Schapper, Huber & van Engelenhoven 2012a). In this chapter, we present a preliminary demonstration of the relatedness of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family based on a comparison of these two reconstructions. We identify a number of regular consonant correspondences across cognate vocabulary between the two groups and reconstruct a list of 89 proto-TAP roots

Numeral words and arithmetic operations in the Alor-Pantar languages

The indigenous numerals of the AP languages, as well as the indigenous structures for arithmetic operations are currently under pressure from Indonesian, and will inevitably be replaced with Indonesian forms and structures. This chapter presents a documentary record of the forms and patterns currently in use to express numerals and arithmetic operations in the Alor-Pantar languages. We describe the structure of cardinal, ordinal and distributive numerals, and how operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions are expressed