A collaborative research project funded by:
- European Science Foundation EuroBABEL Programme
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)
- US National Science Foundation
- UK Arts & Humanities Research Council
Overview
The Alor-Pantar (AP) languages are a group of 15-20 non-Austronesian ("Papuan") languages spoken on several islands in eastern Indonesia. They are of special interest because they have no established genetic relatives. A relationship to the Trans New Guinea family has been proposed, but remains highly disputed, due to the lack of language documentation. Documention of these languages has recently begun, but the material has yet to be analyzed in a rigorous fashion, and the theoretical linguistic community is largely unaware of these data. The implications for language classification, migration patterns, and morphosyntactic and semantic typology remain largely unexplored.
The project aims to document and analyze the AP languages, collecting high quality archival data to deepen our understanding of human language. It is divided into three Individual Projects: Extended Documentation, Word Class Typology and Linguistic Prehistory. The aims of Extended Documentation are (a) to study the spatial reference system of five of the AP languages, focusing on demonstrative systems, locative constructions, and landscape and toponymic terms; (ii) to document the numeral systems, investigating the structure and distribution of numerals, ordinals and numeral classifiers, the concepts they encode, their historical source, and their functional and lexical properties. Word Class Typology aims to investigate (i) the continuum between word classes and grammatical features; (ii) how morphosyntactic categories evolve from diffuse pragmatic and syntactic conditions; (iii) several particularly unusual morphosyntactic phenomena of the AP languages. Linguistic Prehistory aims to provide quantitative evidence for the genetic position of the AP languages, based on bottom-up reconstruction using the comparative method.
Now is a crucial time for this work: the AP languages are severely endangered but still have sufficient vitality to provide additional supporting documentation without difficulty. The quality of AP language data is likely to decline significantly over the next two decades as language shift progresses.
Participating Researchers
- Dr. Marian Klamer, Leiden University, Netherlands (Project Leader)
- Professor Greville Corbett, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
- Dr. Gary Holton, University of Alaska Fairbanks, United States
Individual Project Websites
- EuroBABEL Programme
- Leiden University project website
- Univeristy of Alaska Fairbanks project website
Related Websites
- Linguistic Variation in Eastern Indonesia: the Alor and Pantar Project
- The Western Pantar Language
- Fataluku Language Project
These pages are under construction. Stay tuned for more updates as the project progresses.Last modified 29 May 2009 by Gary Holton
Development of this project was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0824697. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.