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The Alor-Pantar languages : history and typology / edited by Marian Klamer.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Klamer, Marian
- Series:
- Studies in diversity linguistics ; 3.
- Studies in Diversity Linguistics ; volume 3
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Alor-Pantar languages.
- Typology (Linguistics).
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (469 pages) : illustrations; digital, PDF file(s).
- Place of Publication:
- Language Science Press 2014
- Berlin, Germany : Language Science Press, 2014.
- Language Note:
- English
- System Details:
- text file PDF
- Summary:
- 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.
- Notes:
- Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
- Description based on e-publication, viewed on June 10, 2019.
- OCLC:
- 1030814087
- Publisher Number:
- https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_533875
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