TY - BOOK ID - 145973767 TI - The Alor-Pantar languages : history and typology AU - Klamer, Marian AU - Klamer, Margaretha Anna Flora AU - Alor-Pantar Languages: Origin and Theoretical Impact (Project) PY - 2014 PB - Language Science Press DB - UniCat KW - Alor-Pantar languages. KW - Alor-Pantar languages KW - Typology (Linguistics). KW - elevationals KW - alor-pantar languages KW - comparative linguistics KW - papuan languages KW - typology KW - linguistics KW - numeral systems KW - Abui language KW - Adang language KW - Alor–Pantar languages KW - Blagar language KW - Parallel and cross cousins KW - Teiwa language KW - Wersing language KW - Western Pantar language KW - Woisika language KW - History. KW - Typology (Linguistics) UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:145973767 AB - 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. ER -