Papuan Languages Research Articles

OBITUARY: Arnold Clemens Ap: His West Papuan legacy lives on

Arnold Clemens Ap was born on 1 July 1946 on Numfor Island in Biak, at the time, part of the Dutch colony of Netherlands New Guinea. After schooling at church missions in Biak, he studied geography at the Teacher Training School of Cenderawasih University in Abepura, Jayapura, between 1967 and 1973. That year, he was appointed as the curator of the university’s museum, known as Loka Budaya, which became a centre for West Papuan cultural revival. His work to collect and perform songs in Papuan languages played a vital role in the development of a West Papuan national identity, transcending colonial boundaries and inter-tribal conflicts. He was murdered by Indonesian special forces in 1984. This year, 26 April 2024, marked the 40th anniversary of the death of this charismatic cultural leader. For West Papuans, in exile and at home, it has been an important time for commemoration.

VARIASI VERBA PENGARUH PENANDA PERSONA DAN KALA PADA BAHASA-BAHASA DI TANAH PAPUA

Papuan area known as ethnic and language variety. In language aspect, Papuan languages have uniqueness. The most unique is have person and tense marker in verb. The present of person and tense marker making many verb forms. In addition, there are two types of languages. The types are Austronesian and Non-Austronesian, and two types of sentence structure are SOP and SPO. This research aims to describe verb forming of Papuan languages because person and tense markers. And also, to compare verb forming process of Papuan Austronesian and Non-Austronesian, and more SOP and SPO languages structure.

Testing Inferences about Language Contact on Morphosyntax: A Typological Case Study on Alorese–Adang Contact

AbstractWhen linguists make inferences about language contact, control data is required for reliable analysis. Historical data or reconstructions are typically used for that purpose. However, historical data is globally mostly unavailable, and reconstructions are laborious if comparing outcomes of language contact in a typological way. We assess a recent typological proposal (Di Garbo & Napoleão de Souza 2023) that argues that using a single language, called Benchmark language, can serve as a viable control for making inferences about contact. To evaluate this approach, we use as a case study a documented contact situation in Eastern Indonesia between the Austronesian language Alorese and the Papuan language Adang. We sample languages related to Alorese and use computational phylogenetic methods for ancestral reconstruction to analyse if using a single Benchmark produces deviating inferences about contact compared to using Bayesian ancestral reconstructions. Additionally, we test for isolation by distance effects by analysing if the probability of contact effects correlates with increasing geographic distance from the contact region. The results suggest that no isolation by distance effects exist in the data and that none of the single Benchmarks significantly deviate from the ancestral reconstructions.

Brazilian Portuguese vowel discrimination by Nungon and Tashelhit speakers

The vowel system of speakers’ native languages are known to affect perception of vowels in foreign languages (Elvin et al., 2021). In a field-based behavioral experiment, we tested the perception of Brazilian Portuguese vowels (seven-vowel system) by speakers of the Papuan language Nungon (six-vowel system) and the Berber language Tashelhit (three-vowel system). 60 native speakers of Nungon and 38 native speakers of Tashelhit participated. The acoustics of Nungon vowels were previously analyzed using a 30-point analysis technique (Sarvasy et al., 2020). For the present study, we also analyzed Tashelhit vowels using the same technique. We then used discriminant analysis to analyze the relationship between speakers’ performance on the Brazilian Portuguese vowel discrimination task and the acoustics of vowels in their native languages. We present preliminary results of these analyses, and address their possible contributions to four areas: (a) description of the acoustics of under-described languages, (b) the relationship between native vowel systems and perception of foreign vowels, (c) methods for undertaking rigorous acoustic and experimental research in noisy, field environments, and (d) theoretical frameworks for phonetic learning such as the L2LP model (Escudero, 2005; van Leussen and Escudero, 2015).

Adnominal possession in the languages of Wallacea: a survey

Abstract This article presents a typological survey of patterns of adnominal possession in 85 Austronesian and Papuan languages of Linguistic Wallacea, providing a more granular picture of possessive constructions in the region than previously available. The features treated are possessive word orders, locus of possessive marking, possessive classification systems, and multifunctionality of adnominal possessive markers. Unlike their relatives to the west, the Austronesian languages of Linguistic Wallacea tend to show Possessor-Possessum ordering and have an alienability distinction, often instantiated through contrastive direct and indirect constructions. In terms of broad typological features, contact with and shift from Papuan languages can be shown to have caused widespread remodeling of the adnominal possessive patterns in Austronesian languages of the area. However, their distribution and formal manifestations make clear that they are not the result of a single Papuan contact event in a single Austronesian common ancestor but must go back to multiple localized contact events across Linguistic Wallacea. Subregional patterns are often found clustered in smaller groups of languages and are the result of local processes of contact and change including morphologization and morphological loss. These become apparent when tracking changes in historically related form-function pairs in possessive constructions.

Introduction to the Special Issue on “Possession in the languages of Wallacea”

Abstract The area between the Wallace Line and Lydekker’s Line in eastern Indonesia and East Timor has long been recognized as a transitional zone between the flora and fauna of Asia and Oceania. More recently, Linguistic Wallacea, shifted slightly eastward from Biological Wallacea, has been established as a transitional zone between the Southeast Asian and Melanesian linguistic types. This volume focuses on grammatical systems of possession in Linguistic Wallacea, discussing both Austronesian and Papuan languages of the region. Typical traits include Possessor–Possessum word order and alienability contrasts, among others. The cross-familial distribution of these features suggests longstanding language contact throughout the area with borrowing both from Papuan languages into Austronesian ones and vice versa.

Early verb production in Nungon.

This brief research report presents a comparison of the early verb productions of four children acquiring the Papuan language Nungon as a first language. A previous case study examined only verb productions of the child TO; these are now compared with those from three other children, studied from ages 1;1-2;7 (non-dense corpus; one child, AB) and ages 2;4-2;7 (dense corpora; two children, MK and MF). Two of the most striking features of TO's early verb productions are shown to be outliers relative to the other three children: her 'root nominals' stage and her delayed near future tense production. Neither of these is transparently linked to patterns in her parents' child-directed speech. The other children also display differing strategies into language production. The dense corpus is beneficial for catching tokens of less-frequent inflections, but the frequent long recording sessions may be difficult for at least one child to tolerate.

Sociocultural Variations of Verb Markers in the West Papuan Language

The problems discussed in this study are based on variations in verb meaning in west Papuan speech, namely Irires and Miyah Language. These two languages are in one area in Tambarauw Regency but have different verbs. For this reason, a study of verb and hyponymy categories is needed in morphology studies to identify variations in verb meaning in Irires and Miyah languages. This research was conducted to find out socio-cultural variations in verb meaning in the West Papuan language, namely Irires and Miyah. The researchers used qualitative, in the Iris and Miyah districts of the Tambarauw Regency. Data collection techniques were carried out by observation, interview, and documentation techniques by participating directly with the Irires and Miyah communities, supported by relevant research references as a complement to information. The instrument was an instrument in the form of a list of questions to record the classification of verb variations in prices and Miyah language. Triangulation methods carry out data analysis techniques by transcribing the results of recording variations in the pronunciation of Irires and Miyah languages which are then represented in good language and understood. The results of the study showed the use of Irires and Miyah eating verbs that resulted in verb structures that have a pronominal persona that has a practical name including {d}, {b}, {a,i,u,e,o}, {g}, {ig}, {m}, {n}, {p}, {t}.
 Keywords: Sociocultural Variation, Papuan Language, Verb Markers

Papuan-Austronesian contact and the spread of numeral systems in Melanesia

Abstract This study analyzes the numeral systems of Austronesian and Papuan languages, investigating their areal distribution and considering their most likely ancestral states. The presence or absence of different methods of numeration has often been ascribed to contact-induced change. This can certainly be seen in scholarship pertaining to Melanesia, where Austronesian languages probably first came into contact with Papuan languages around 3,500 years ago. Indeed, since Proto-Austronesian is reconstructed as having employed a decimal (base-10) numeral system (with reflexes occurring throughout the Austronesian world), the presence of quinary (base-5) numeral systems in the Austronesian languages of Melanesia has commonly been attributed to contact with Papuan languages. Relying on a typological survey of 1,825 languages, this paper argues that highly conventionalized quinary systems were probably rare in Melanesia prior to the arrival of Austronesian languages. Rather, it was more likely that Austronesian speakers spread lexicalized quinary systems to Papuan groups, not the other way around. In making this argument, the paper stresses that, while numeration may be something that is linguistically encoded in a systematic fashion, it may also be realized as a cultural feature without strongly conventionalized lexicalized expressions.

Pushing the boundaries: Marginal phonemes and dialogic interaction

Phonemes with restricted distribution represent an interesting analytic challenge. Well-known sources include the adoption of certain phonemes from other languages in borrowed words, emerging phonemic splits, and special phonological subsystems (e.g. ideophones). This paper aims to widen our conception of such marginal phonemes, by incorporating another source: specific vocal gestures called into play in interactional settings. Our initial puzzle involves a restricted phoneme set in the Papuan language Nen: two classes of sounds are restricted to interactive contexts, namely interjections and deictics. These sounds are the nasal vowels ã , ẽ , and the glottal fricative h . Several questions arise here. Should these restricted sounds be considered part of the phoneme system? How did they evolve? How does their presence interact with seemingly equivalent sounds in neighbouring languages, in contexts of possible loanwords? We then pass to two other languages where sounds that are unquestionably phonemes have, in at least some phonotactic positions, clear correlations with interactive uses: initial /ð/ in English, essentially restricted to words of person (thou), space (that), time (then), or discourse deixis (the, though), and glottal stops with morphemic function in Bininj Kunwok, restricted to immediate aspect[43], addressee-engaged demonstratives, and kinship vocatives. It is already known that non-phonemic speech sounds (e.g. what is written mhm in English) are used in interaction. This paper proposes that the special phonetics of interaction can integrate further into the sound system and, in such cases as those presented here, either expand the phonological system in absolute terms by adding new phonemes, or expand the phonotactic possibilities of phonemes already occurring in other phonotactic positions.

Agreement and argument realization in Mian discourse

A common assumption about the function of gender agreement in discourse is that it serves referent identification and reference tracking. There is some evidence in favour of this view, and an increasing body of research which finds no foundation for it; this study further supports the latter perspective. It is based on a fully annotated corpus of the Papuan language Mian and uses a noteworthy property of the Mian agreement system: object agreement in transitive verbs is “sporadic”, i.e. it depends on the lexical type of a transitive verb whether it agrees with its object. Therefore we can measure whether speakers of Mian manipulate overt vs. null arguments in discourse to compensate whenever lack of agreement might make argument reference ambiguous. The results clearly show that the proportions of overtly realized objects for agreeing verbs and non-agreeing verbs do not differ significantly, thus lending little support to the claim that gender agreement serves a major function in reference tracking in discourse.

Vowel acoustics of Nungon child-directed speech, adult dyadic conversation, and foreigner-directed monologues.

In many communities around the world, speech to infants (IDS) and small children (CDS) has increased mean pitch, increased pitch range, increased vowel duration, and vowel hyper-articulation when compared to speech directed to adults (ADS). Some of these IDS and CDS features are also attested in foreigner-directed speech (FDS), which has been studied for a smaller range of languages, generally major national languages, spoken by millions of people. We examined vowel acoustics in CDS, conversational ADS, and monologues directed to a foreigner (possible FDS, labeled MONO here) in the Towet dialect of the Papuan language Nungon, spoken by 300 people in a remote region in northeastern Papua New Guinea. Previous work established that Nungon CDS entails optional use of consonant alteration, special nursery vocabulary, and special morphosyntax. This study shows that Nungon CDS to children aged 2;2–3;10 lacks vowel hyper-articulation, but still displays other common prosodic traits of CDS styles around the world: increased mean pitch and pitch range. A developmental effect was also attested, in that speech to 2-year-olds contained vowels that were significantly longer than those in speech to 3-year-olds, which in turn had vowels of similar duration to those in Nungon ADS. We also found that Nungon FDS vowel triangles, measured from monologues primarily directed to a non-native speaker, were significantly larger than those of either CDS or conversational ADS, indicating vowel hyper-articulation. The Nungon pattern may align with the patterns of vowels in Norwegian IDS, CDS, and FDS, where hyper-articulation is found in FDS, but not CDS or IDS. The languages of the New Guinea area constitute 20% of the world's languages, but neither an acoustic comparison of vowels in CDS and ADS, nor an acoustic study of FDS, has previously been completed for any language of New Guinea. The function of an FDS style in a small, closed community like those of much of New Guinea may differ from that in larger societies, since there are very few non-native speakers of Nungon. Thus, this study uses monologues recorded with a foreign researcher as interlocutor to study Nungon FDS.

Assessing Human Genome-wide Variation in the Massim Region of Papua New Guinea and Implications for the Kula Trading Tradition.

The Massim, a cultural region that includes the southeastern tip of mainland Papua New Guinea (PNG) and nearby PNG offshore islands, is renowned for a trading network called Kula, in which different valuable items circulate in different directions among some of the islands. Although the Massim has been a focus of anthropological investigation since the pioneering work of Malinowski in 1922, the genetic background of its inhabitants remains relatively unexplored. To characterize the Massim genomically, we generated genome-wide SNP data from 192 individuals from 15 groups spanning the entire region. Analyzing these together with comparative data, we found that all Massim individuals have variable Papuan-related (indigenous) and Austronesian-related (arriving ∼3,000 years ago) ancestries. Individuals from Rossel Island in southern Massim, speaking an isolate Papuan language, have the highest amount of a distinct Papuan ancestry. We also investigated the recent contact via sharing of identical by descent (IBD) genomic segments and found that Austronesian-related IBD tracts are widely distributed geographically, but Papuan-related tracts are shared exclusively between the PNG mainland and Massim, and between the Bismarck and Solomon Archipelagoes. Moreover, the Kula-practicing groups of the Massim show higher IBD sharing among themselves than do groups that do not participate in Kula. This higher sharing predates the formation of Kula, suggesting that extensive contact between these groups since the Austronesian settlement may have facilitated the formation of Kula. Our study provides the first comprehensive genome-wide assessment of Massim inhabitants and new insights into the fascinating Kula system.

Les classes nominales en tuwari (Nouvelle-Guinée)

Abstract This article describes noun classes in Tuwari, a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea. The exponents of gender are clitics, realized once per clause-level phrase, and always at their right periphery. In noun phrases, the exponent is a gender-agreeing article, while on verb phrases it is a subject index. This agreement system is uncanonical since it brings into play a set of complex syntactic rules. As in other Papuan languages, such gender markers used at the periphery of the noun phrase share formal and semantic properties with markers of subordination.

The Greater West Bomberai Language Family

This paper demonstrates the existence of the Greater West Bomberai family, bringing the Timor–Alor–Pantar language family of the Lesser Sunda islands into a genealogical unit with the Papuan languages of the western part of the Bomberai peninsula in New Guinea. Applying the comparative method to the increasingly available data from these languages, we demonstrate their relatedness on the basis of forty-seven lexical cognate sets with largely regular sound correspondences. Grammatical evidence in the form of pronouns is invoked to further demonstrate the relatedness of these languages. Loans from Austronesian languages have been identified and eliminated from our comparisons. Establishing the family has repercussions for our view of Island Southeast Asian prehistory, entailing the existence of maritime Papuan-language-speaking groups from an early time.

The dialect chain of the Timor-Alor-Pantar language family

Abstract This paper refines the subgroupings of the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family of Papuan languages, using a systematic Bayesian phylogenetics study. While recent work indicates that the TAP family comprises a Timor (T) branch and an Alor-Pantar (AP) branch (Holton et al., 2012; Schapper et al., 2017), the internal structure of the AP branch has proven to be a challenging issue, and earlier studies leave large gaps in our understanding. Our Bayesian inference study is based on an extensive set of TAP lexical data from the online LexiRumah database (Kaiping et al., 2019b; Kaiping and Klamer, 2018). Systematically comparing different analytical models and tying them back to the evidence in terms of historical linguistics, we arrive at a subgrouping structure of the TAP family that is based on features of the phylogenies shared across the different analyses. Our TAP tree differs from all earlier proposals by inferring the East Alor subgroup as an early split-off from all other AP languages, instead of the most deeply embedded subgroup inside that branch. The evidences suggests that dialect cluster effects played a major role in the formation of today’s Timor-Alor-Pantar languages.

A language documentation perspective: A commentary on Kidd and Garcia (2022)

This commentary on Kidd and Garcia takes a language documentation perspective on diversifying language acquisition research. Following a brief summary of relevant research in Papuan languages, it sketches out current developments to extend into child language documentation. It is argued that these developments constitute a unique opportunity to engage with on-going discussions on best practice in order to ensure that the resulting documentations are of use to both fields: language documentation and language acquisition.

Noun phrase complexity and contiguity in a Papuan language

AbstractThis article considers NP complexity and discontinuity in the Papuan language Coastal Marind. First, I give an overview of NP structure in the language, which is characterized by extremely limited possibility of elaboration and modification. I connect this to the observation that Papuan languages are characterized by exceptionally simple NP structures. The lack of research makes it difficult to evaluate the significance of such observations, but I suggest that Coastal Marind is an example of a Papuan language that imposes very strict upper boundaries on NP complexity. Second, while an argument could be made that Coastal Marind NPs allow considerable discontinuity, more thorough consideration of the facts reveals a fundamental, tight-knit, left-branching NP structure, which contrasts with relatively rarely employed looser nominal configurations, including discontinuous nominal expressions. The discontinuous construals are restricted primarily by information structure. Although considered grammatical by speakers, they are extremely rare in corpus data. I propose that aboutness is an important factor constraining the choice of nominal construal types in Coastal Marind discourse.

Qaqet

Qaqet (Glottocode qaqe1238; ISO 639-3: byx) is a Papuan (i.e. non-Austronesian) Baining language that is spoken by an estimated 15,000 people in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province. Figure 1 shows a map of where Qaqet and the four other known Baining languages (Mali, Kairak (also spelt Qairaq – see map), Simbali and Ura) are spoken (see Stebbins, Evans & Terrill 2017 for an overview of Baining; for phonological descriptions, see Stanton 2007 on Ura, and Stebbins 2011 on Mali). The wider affiliations of the Baining languages are unknown. They share typological features with other East Papuan languages (i.e. the non-Austronesian languages of Island Melanesia), but there is no historical-comparative evidence to establish genealogical relationships.1 In terms of phonology, there are no structures shared across all of East Papuan, but Baining languages have similarities to the East Papuan language Kuot spoken on neighbouring New Ireland (i.e. the intervocalic lenition of voiceless plosives; pitch movements at the right edge of intonation units).2 Furthermore, language contact is known to have taken place across the entire region, and Baining languages share typological features with Oceanic languages. This includes phonemic contrasts between voiceless and voiced plosives and between /r/ and /l/; as well as a number of morphosyntactic structures (e.g. a large inventory of definite and indefinite articles, AVO/SV constituent order, prepositions).

Cross-clause planning in Nungon (Papua New Guinea): Eye-tracking evidence.

Hundreds of languages worldwide use a sentence structure known as the "clause chain," in which 20 or more clauses can be stacked to form a sentence. The Papuan language Nungon is among a subset of clause chaining languages that require "switch-reference" suffixes on nonfinal verbs in chains. These suffixes announce whether the subject of each upcoming clause will differ from the subject of the previous clause. We examine two major issues in psycholinguistics: predictive processing in comprehension, and advance planning in production. Whereas previous work on other languages has demonstrated that sentence planning can be incremental, switch-reference marking would seem to prohibit strictly incremental planning, as it requires speakers to plan the next clause before they can finish producing the current one. This suggests an intriguing possibility: planning strategies may be fundamentally different in Nungon. We used a mobile eye-tracker and solar-powered laptops in a remote village in Papua, New Guinea, to track Nungon speakers' gaze in two experiments: comprehension and production. Curiously, during comprehension, fixation data failed to find evidence that switch-reference marking is used for predictive processing. However, during production, we found evidence for advance planning of switch-reference markers, and, by extension, the subjects they presage. We propose that this degree of advance syntactic planning pushes the boundaries of what is known about sentence planning, drawing on data from a novel morpheme type in an understudied language.