Alor-Pantar languages (original) (raw)

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This edition is superseded by the second edition.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
The internal history of the Alor-Pantar language family
Gary Holton, Laura C. Robinson
The relatedness of Timor-Kisar and Alor-Pantar languages
A preliminary demonstration
Antoinette Schapper, Juliette Huber, Aone van Engelenhoven
The linguistic position of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages
Gary Holton, Laura C. Robinson
Kinship in the Alor-Pantar languages
Antoinette Schapper
Elevation in the spatial deictic systems of Alor-Pantar languages
Antoinette Schapper
Numeral systems in the Alor-Pantar languages
Antoinette Schapper, Marian Klamer
Numeral words and arithmetic operations in the Alor-Pantar languages
Marian Klamer, Antoinette Schapper, Greville Corbett, Gary Holton, František Kratochvíl, Laura C. Robinson
Plural number words in the Alor-Pantar languages
Marian Klamer, Antoinette Schapper, Greville Corbett
Participant marking: Corpus study and video elicitation
Sebastian Fedden, Dunstan Brown

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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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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The Alor-Pantar languages The Alor-Pantar languages
22_Frontmatter 22_Frontmatter
22_0_Preface.pdf 22_0_Preface.pdf
22_1_The Alor-Pantar languages: Linguistic context, history and typology.pdf 22_1_The Alor-Pantar languages: Linguistic context, history and typology.pdf
22_2_The internal history of the Alor Pantar language family.pdf 22_2_The internal history of the Alor Pantar language family.pdf
22_3_The relatedness of Timor-Kisar and Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_3_The relatedness of Timor-Kisar and Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_4_The linguistic position of the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_4_The linguistic position of the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_5_Kinship in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_5_Kinship in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_6_Elevation in the spatial deictic systems of Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_6_Elevation in the spatial deictic systems of Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_7_Numeral systems in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_7_Numeral systems in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_8_Numeral words in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_8_Numeral words in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_9_Plural number words in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf 22_9_Plural number words in the Alor-Pantar languages.pdf
22_10_Participant marking: Corpus study and video elicitation.pdf 22_10_Participant marking: Corpus study and video elicitation.pdf
22_Indexes.pdf 22_Indexes.pdf
Bibliography.bib Bibliography.bib
Complete book Complete book

Published

January 1, 2015

Series

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

Details about the available publication format: PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

Details about the available publication format: Softcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-1-523743-68-1

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-944675-60-2