English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

The East Papuan languages: A preliminary typological appraisal

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons48

Dunn,  Michael
Language and Cognition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Pioneers of Island Melanesia, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons150

Reesink,  Ger
Language and Cognition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Pioneers of Island Melanesia, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons183

Terrill,  Angela
Language and Cognition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Pioneers of Island Melanesia, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

dunn_2002_East papuan.pdf
(Publisher version), 2MB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Dunn, M., Reesink, G., & Terrill, A. (2002). The East Papuan languages: A preliminary typological appraisal. Oceanic Linguistics, 41(1), 28-62.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0013-1ADC-1
Abstract
This paper examines the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, with a view to considering their typological similarities and differences. The East Papuan languages are thought to be the descendants of the languages spoken by the original inhabitants of Island Melanesia, who arrived in the area up to 50,000 years ago. The Oceanic Austronesian languages are thought to have come into the area with the Lapita peoples 3,500 years ago. With this historical backdrop in view, our paper seeks to investigate the linguistic relationships between the scattered Papuan languages of Island Melanesia. To do this, we survey various structural features, including syntactic patterns such as constituent order in clauses and noun phrases and other features of clause structure, paradigmatic structures of pronouns, and the structure of verbal morphology. In particular, we seek to discern similarities between the languages that might call for closer investigation, with a view to establishing genetic relatedness between some or all of the languages. In addition, in examining structural relationships between languages, we aim to discover whether it is possible to distinguish between original Papuan elements and diffused Austronesian elements of these languages. As this is a vast task, our paper aims merely to lay the groundwork for investigation into these and related questions.