The Alor-Pantar languages history and typology
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-A...
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| Otros Autores: | , |
| Formato: | Libro electrónico |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Berlin, Germany :
Language Science Press
2014
2014. |
| Colección: | Studies in diversity linguistics ;
3. |
| Materias: | |
| Ver en Biblioteca Universitat Ramon Llull: | https://discovery.url.edu/permalink/34CSUC_URL/1im36ta/alma991009430546706719 |
| Sumario: | 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. |
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| Notas: | Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph |
| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (469 pages) : illustrations; digital, PDF file(s) Also available in print form |
| Bibliografía: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
