This dissertation reconstructs the history of Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken in east Indonesia, by combining perspectives from oral history and historical linguistics. The social history... Show moreThis dissertation reconstructs the history of Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken in east Indonesia, by combining perspectives from oral history and historical linguistics. The social history of the Alorese people is reconstructed through migration stories based on narrative accounts from fourteen Alorese villages. The historical linguistic study of Alorese begins with a grammatical description of the Alorese dialect spoken in northeast Pantar. This is followed by a study of Alorese historical phonology, in which varieties of Alorese are compared with varieties of its sister language, Western Lamaholot. This dissertation also examines lexical borrowing from the Alor-Pantar (Papuan) languages into Alorese and vice versa. Based on a combined investigation of lingusitic and oral history, this dissertation proposes that the homeland of the Alorese people may have been in northeast Pantar. The study of Alorese historical phonology results in the bottom-up reconstruction of the sounds of Proto-Alorese and its vocabulary, and the establishment of Alorese as a subgroup of the Flores-Lembata languages, the next higher group within Malayo-Polynesian. In addition, the investigation of loanwords also provides insight into the history of contact between the Alorese and the speakers of the Alor-Pantar (Papuan) languages in the Alor archipelago. Show less
This dissertation reconstructs the history of the Flores-Lembata languages (Austronesian, eastern Indonesia) by investigating traces of contact in the lexicon and grammar. Part I fills a gap in the... Show moreThis dissertation reconstructs the history of the Flores-Lembata languages (Austronesian, eastern Indonesia) by investigating traces of contact in the lexicon and grammar. Part I fills a gap in the documentation of the Flores-Lembata languages by providing a descriptive grammar of the previously undescribed Central Lembata language. Part II researches the history of the phonology and the lexicon of the Flores-Lembata languages and provides evidence for both inherited lexical items and a non-Austronesian lexical substrate. Part III examines morpho-syntactic features and their history of contact. Eight atypical structural features of the Flores-Lembata languages are described and evaluated on their potential of being the result of contact with non-Austronesian languages of the area.It is proposed that the Flores-Lembata languages have been in contact with one or more languages typologically similar to the non-Austronesian Alor-Pantar languages that are currently spoken on two adjacent islands. This contact between Flores-Lembata languages and non-Austronesian languages must have been ongoing since the time of Proto-Flores-Lembata until after the break-up of the family into subgroups. The Lamaholot subgroups have gained more non-Austronesian features than the other subgroups. This suggests that the contact of each of the subgroups must have varied in intensity and length. Show less
This paper investigates variation in possessive marking in Abui, a language spoken in a minority bilingual community in eastern Indonesia. Abui youngsters grow up acquiring both Abui (Papuan) and... Show moreThis paper investigates variation in possessive marking in Abui, a language spoken in a minority bilingual community in eastern Indonesia. Abui youngsters grow up acquiring both Abui (Papuan) and Alor Malay (Austronesian), but only become active speakers of Abui when they reach adolescence. Due to this delay, their Abui is expected to show signs of both imperfect acquisition and contact-induced effects. This language background makes them an interesting population on which to carry out a cross-sectional study on contact-induced variation. Abui distinguishes between a reflexive and non-reflexive possessive marker, while Alor Malay makes no such distinction. Combining methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics, and using both a production and a comprehension task, we study the variation between four age-groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals: (pre-)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders. Our results reveal that (pre-)adolescent males are the drivers of variation, and generalize the non-reflexive possessive marker to reflexive environments. This suggests that over the next decades the reflexive possessive prefix may be lost in Abui. This paper is a direct answer to a call by Ross (2013) to conduct in-depth variationist studies to establish more synchronically informed approaches to the study of language contact. In addition, by combining production and comprehension studies and applying them to an indigenous minority language, it expands the empirical support for a prominent hypothesis of bilingual processing: the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000b). Show less
This book provides a synchronic description of the phonology, word classes, morphology, and syntax of the Cheke Holo language. Cheke Holo is an Austronesian language of the Oceanic subgroup, spoken... Show moreThis book provides a synchronic description of the phonology, word classes, morphology, and syntax of the Cheke Holo language. Cheke Holo is an Austronesian language of the Oceanic subgroup, spoken by 11,000 speakers on Santa Isabel island in the Solomon Islands. This is the first published grammar of Cheke Holo. It is based on the author’s 30 years of linguistic work carried out among Cheke Holo speakers. Like many other Oceanic languages, Cheke Holo has SVO word order, serial verbs, distinguishes alienable and inalianable possession of nouns, and reduplicates verbs to intensify or prolong the action they denote. Four types of demonstratives are attested in Cheke Holo. Basic distinctions of the demonstratives occur between specificity and number, and whether or not the noun modified is proximal or distal. The two-way distinction of past and non-past is the most useful descriptor for the Cheke Holo tense system. Several features of Cheke Holo phonology and grammar are less typical for an Oceanic language. These include its consonant clusters, the voiceless continuants, the verb nominalizations in four different phonemic environments, and the gender distinction in the third person singular pronouns. The encoding of pragmatic emphasis is a common feature of Cheke Holo grammar. Show less
This article discusses the plural word hire in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, in eastern Indonesia. Following the methodological requisites for contact... Show moreThis article discusses the plural word hire in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, in eastern Indonesia. Following the methodological requisites for contact-induced change, I claim that the plural word hire emerged through contact with Papuan Alor-Pantar languages, because (i) Alorese was and still is spoken in close contact with Alor-Pantar languages; (ii) Alorese and the neighboring Alor-Pantar languages share the presence of a plural word, and their plural words have similar syntactic and semantic properties; (iii) Alor-Pantar languages had plural words before they came into contact with Alorese; and (iv) Alorese did not have the plural word hire before it came into contact with Alor-Pantar languages. The innovation of hire is a case of contact-induced grammaticalization, whereby the form is inherited and developed from an original third person plural pronoun going back to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *si-ida, while the function of the plural word is borrowed from the neighboring Alor-Pantar languages. Show less
