This volume honouring Malcolm Ross traces his career and brings together essays by more than twenty scholars reporting new work in historical linguistics. Many of the papers concern Ross's interests in Austronesian and Papuan historical linguistic studies, whilst others contribute to the theory and method of historical linguistics .

PART I: The ten chapters in Part 1 (Historical relationships among languages) are as follows. (1) In ‘Remapping the Austronesian expansion' Roger Blench examines the geographic range of Austronesian influence, particularly looking at previously unnoticed cases outside present-day Austronesian language areas. (2) ‘The historical value of single words' by Robert Blust examines cases where single words have provided the author with key information about the histories of the Austronesian languages in which they occur. (3) Bethwyn Evans takes significant first steps towards a reconstruction of the protolanguage of the (Papuan) South Bougainville family in ‘Beyond pronouns: further evidence for South Bougainville '. (4) Alexandre François provides data and historical analysis of a small group of little known Oceanic Austronesian languages in ‘The languages of Vanikoro: three lexicons and one grammar', discussing the conundrum in his subtitle. (5) In ‘Expanding character sets for phylogeny: a Slavic test case' Johanna Nichols shows how bound morphology can be used as characters for computational phylogenies. (6) Andrew Pawley's paper ‘Greenberg's Indo-Pacific hypothesis: an assessment' provides the first (!) thoroughgoing assessment of the 1971 hypothesis about the relatedness of Tasmanian, Papuan and Andamanese languages. (7) Ger Reesink investigates the possibility of a historical connection between languages of the Bird's Head and (Proto) Oceanic. (8) In ‘How many branches in a tree? Cua and East (North) Bahnaric' Paul Sidwell provides a solution to a longstanding problem in relationships among certain Mon-Khmer (Austro-Asiatic) languages. (9) Jacinta Smallhorn's ‘Binanderean as a member of the Trans New Guinea family' provides evidence that a family of languages in SE Papua is part of the much larger (Papuan) Trans New Guinea family. (10) In ‘The Papuan languages of the Eastern Bismarcks: migration, origins and connections' Tonya N. Stebbins examines evidence for relationship among languages of eastern New Britain and New Ireland .

PART II: The twelve chapters in Part II (Historical development of languages across time) are as follows: (11) ‘On the zero (voice) prefix and bare verbs in Austronesian languages of Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia' by I Wayan Arka is an examination of contrasting passive constructions on either side of an assumed major linguistic boundary in central Indonesia. (12) In ‘Dental discrepancies and the sound of Proto Austronesian' Mark Donohue examines the typology of dental and alveolar stops and their distribution among Austronesian languages. (13) Robert Early examines how deictics have become relativisers in many Oceanic languages. (14) Paul Geraghty's ‘Nasal strengthening in the Fijian languages' gives instances of stops becoming nasals in the Oceanic languages of Fiji. (15) In ‘On reconstructing pronominal proto-paradigms: methodological considerations from the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia ' Harold Koch discusses the importance of appropriate method in reconstructing paradigms, and shows how they can be significant in determining genealogical relations among languages. (16) Paul Jen-Kuei Li and Shigeru Tsuchida show the significance for reconstruction of hitherto little discussed non-productive infixes in ‘Yet more Proto Austronesian infixes'. (17) In ‘Proprietives in Oceanic' Frantisek Lichtenberk reconstructs the history of a formative which derives property-denoting words, mainly from nouns. (18) John Lynch addresses the intriguing development of non-decimal or incompletely decimal numeral systems from decimal systems in Vanuatu and New Caledonia in ‘At sixes and sevens'. (19) Anna Margetts describes a recent piece of morphological history, tracking the ‘Spread of the Saliba-Logea plural marker'. (20) Meredith Osmond and Andrew Pawley reconstruct ‘Verbs of perception in Proto Oceanic', and (21) Lawrence A. Reid provides a carefully reasoned argument for ‘The reconstruction of a dual pronoun to Proto Malayo-Polynesian'. (22) In their ‘From ki-N "get N" in Formosan languages to ki-V "get V-ed" (passive) in Rukai, Paiwan and Puyuma', Elizabeth Zeitoun and Stacy F. Teng tackle the history of a development in certain Austronesian languages of Taiwan which raises interesting questions about parallel development vs contact-induced change.