Superseded: The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology

Marian Klamer (ed)

Synopsis

This edition is superseded by the second edition.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.

Chapters

  • The Alor-Pantar languages
    Linguistic context, history and typology
    Marian Klamer
    Chapter 1
  • The internal history of the Alor-Pantar language family
    Gary Holton, Laura C. Robinson
    Chapter 2
  • The relatedness of Timor-Kisar and Alor-Pantar languages
    A preliminary demonstration
    Antoinette Schapper, Juliette Huber, Aone van Engelenhoven
    Chapter 3
  • The linguistic position of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages
    Gary Holton, Laura C. Robinson
    Chapter 4
  • Kinship in the Alor-Pantar languages
    Antoinette Schapper
    Chapter 5
  • Elevation in the spatial deictic systems of Alor-Pantar languages
    Antoinette Schapper
    Chapter 6
  • Numeral systems in the Alor-Pantar languages
    Antoinette Schapper, Marian Klamer
    Chapter 7
  • Numeral words and arithmetic operations in the Alor-Pantar languages
    Marian Klamer, Antoinette Schapper, Greville Corbett, Gary Holton, František Kratochvíl, Laura C. Robinson
    Chapter 8
  • Plural number words in the Alor-Pantar languages
    Marian Klamer, Antoinette Schapper, Greville Corbett
    Chapter 9
  • Participant marking: Corpus study and video elicitation
    Sebastian Fedden, Dunstan Brown
    Chapter 10

Reviews

  • Oceanic Linguistics 55 (1) by Tyler Heston published June 1, 2016
    ... In summary, this work represents a major contribution to the documentation and description of the Alor-Pantar languages, and the authors are to be congratulated especially for their commitment to using technological innovation to disseminate their data and results. ...

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The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology

Author Biography

Marian Klamer

Marian Klamer (1965) is Professor of Austronesian and Papuan Linguistics at Leiden University. Over the last two decades she has lead research projects describing and documenting Austronesian and Papuan minority languages in Eastern Indonesia; comparing their typological characteristics; and reconstructing their history. Her publications include grammars on Kambera (1998), Teiwa (2010), and Alorese (2011), as well as several edited volumes, and over fifty articles on a wide range of topics. Klamer is currently leading the NWO-VICI project "Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: the Lesser Sunda Islands" (2014-2019).

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Published

January 1, 2015
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Studies in Diversity Linguistics

Print ISSN

2363-5568
Cite as
Klamer, Marian (ed.). 2015. The Alor-Pantar languages: History and typology. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.17169/FUDOCS_document_000000020993
Copyright (c) 2017 Marian Klamer; Gary Holton, Laura C. Robinson, Antoinette Schapper, Juliette Huber, Aone van Engelenhoven, Greville Corbett, František Kratochvíl, Sebastian Fedden, Dunstan Brown

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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2014-09-06

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10.17169/FUDOCS_document_000000020993

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Bibliography

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Frontmatter

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Preface

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Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Indexes

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2014-09-06

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