Pacific Linguistics

The Koiarianfamily, part of the putative Trans New Guinea group of Papuan languages, stretches from around Port Moresby on the southern coast of southeast Papua almost to the sea on the north coast at the eastern end of the Hydrographers’ Ranges. The author here enlarges on his lexicostatistically based 1969 work and applies the comparative method of historical linguistics to the Koiarian languages, identifying shared innovations that define subgroups within the family and reconstructing the protophonology and about 120 lexical items of Proto Koiarian. He provides similar reconstructions for Proto Koiaric and Proto Bariaic, the languages ancestral to the two major subgroups within Koiarian.

Abma, one of the largest indigenous languages of Vanuatu, is spoken by approximately 7,800 people in the central part of Pentecost Island. This volume presents a short grammar of the Abma language, including major sections on word class categorisation, phonology, morphology, phrase and clause-level syntax, and information structure.

This is the first single-authored book that attempts to describe the Austronesian language family in its entirety. Its topics include: physical and cultural background, official and national languages, largest and smallest languages, speech levels and respect language, male/female speech differences, vituperation and profanity, secret languages, ritual languages, language contact, a survey of sound systems, numerals and numeration, colour terms, demonstratives, locatives and directions, pronouns, metaphor, language names, greetings, semantic change, lexical change, linguistic paleontology, morphology, syntax, the history of scholarship on Austronesian languages, a critical assessment of the reconstruction of Proto Austronesian phonology, sound changes, claims about the external relations of the Austronesian languages, subgrouping, Austronesian scholarship, and an extensive list of references to the published literature.

The Indo-Aryan languages and dialects constitute a dialect continuum, characterised by variable, non-discrete boundaries between speech communities. In order to reconstruct linguistic history it is necessary to take stock of this sociolinguistic context and adjust the methods of reconstruction accordingly. This study presents a theoretically robust, sociolinguistic framework for historical reconstruction which supplements a traditional comparative reconstruction of phonology and morphology.

This book is an attempt to establish the genetic relatedness of a set of some twenty named regional speech varieties of the Northern Kimberley region of Western Australia. We argue that, contrary to recent claims by some scholars, they constitute a genetic family-like unit. The case is argued by application of the comparative method, along with a comparison of lexical similarities (in form and semantics) within the basic vocabularies of the languages. The results of these two independent methods are in substantial agreement, thus providing independent support for our proposals. We also present comparative evidence that three primary subgroups can be distinguished in the family.