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