Explore
The Alor-Pantar family constitutes the westernmost outlier group of Papuan(Non-Austronesian) languages. Its twenty or so languages are spoken onthe islands of Alor and Pantar, located just north of Timor, in eastern In-donesia. Together with the Papuan languages of Timor, they make up theTimor-Alor-Pantar family. The languages average 5,000 speakers and areunder pressure from the local Malay variety as well as the national lan-guage, Indonesian.This volume studies the internal and external linguistic history of thisinteresting group, and showcases some of its unique typological features,such as the preference to index the transitive patient-like argument onthe verb but not the agent-like one; the extreme variety in morphologi-cal alignment patterns; the use of plural number words; the existence ofquinary numeral systems; the elaborate spatial deictic systems involvingan elevation component; and the great variation exhibited in their kinshipsystems.Unlike many other Papuan languages, Alor-Pantar languages do not ex-hibit clause-chaining, do not have switch reference systems, never suffixsubject indexes to verbs, do not mark gender, but do encode clusivity intheir pronominal systems. Indeed, apart from a broadly similar head-finalsyntactic profile, there is little else that the Alor-Pantar languages sharewith Papuan languages spoken in other regions. While all of them showsome traces of contact with Austronesian languages, in general, borrow-ing from Austronesian has not been intense, and contact with Malay andIndonesian is a relatively recent phenomenon in most of the Alor-Pantarregion.
This book is included in DOAB.
Why read this book? Have your say.
You must be logged in to comment.
Rights Information
Are you the author or publisher of this work? If so, you can claim it as yours by registering as an Unglue.it rights holder.Downloads
This work has been downloaded 195 times via unglue.it ebook links.
- 57 - pdf (CC BY) at OAPEN Library.
Keywords
- Abui language
- Adang language
- Alor-Pantar languages
- Alor–Pantar languages
- Blagar language
- Comparative linguistics
- elevationals
- Language
- Language qualifiers
- Linguistics
- numeral systems
- Oceanic & Austronesian languages
- Papuan languages
- Parallel and cross cousins
- Teiwa language
- thema EDItEUR::2 Language qualifiers::2P Oceanic and Austronesian languages::2PC Papuan languages
- thema EDItEUR::C Language and Linguistics::CF Linguistics
- typology
- Wersing language
- Western Pantar language
- Woisika language
Links
DOI: 10.26530/OAPEN_533875Editions