The historical relations of the Papuan languages scattered across the islands of the Alor archipelago, Timor, and Kisar in southeast Indonesia have remained largely conjectural. This paper makes a first step towards demonstrating that the languages of Alor and Pantar form a single genealogical group. Applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago, we use form-meaning pairings in basic cognate sets to establish regular sound correspondences that support the view these languages as genetically related. We reconstruct 97 Proto-Alor-Pantar vocabulary items and propose an internal subgrouping based on shared innovations. Finally, we compare Alor-Pantar with Papuan languages of Timor and with Trans-New Guinea languages, concluding that there is no lexical evidence supporting the inclusion of Alor-Pantar languages in the Trans-New Guinea family.

Alorese is a prime example of a morphologically isolating language. This paper traces the process of morphological simplification it has undergone by addressing the following questions: (i) What was the morphological profile of its ancestor, pre-Alorese? (ii) When did Alorese start to lose its morphology? (iii) Which factors caused this loss? By comparing the morphological profile of current Alorese with its sister language, Lewoingu-Lamaholot, I conclude that the morphology of pre-Alorese was at least as complex as current Lewoingu-Lamaholot. Pre-Alorese underwent a process of drastic and swift morphological loss after its speakers migrated to Pantar island around 1300 AD. Pre-Alorese must have had a significant proportion of adult second language speakers who acquired it imperfectly, thus causing its morphology to be lost. Thus, this is a good example of morphological simplification due to imperfect adult learning in a small scale language variety.

We examine the varying role of conditions on grammatical relation marking (namely animacy and volitionality)

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This paper explores the use of demonstratives in non-embedded clausal nominalisations. We present data and analysis from three Papuan languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family in south-east Indonesia. In these languages, demonstratives can apply to the clausal as well as to the nominal domain, contributing contrastive semantic content in assertive stance-taking and attention-directing utterances. In the Timor-Alor-Pantar constructions, meanings that are to do with spatial and discourse locations at the participant level apply to spatial, temporal and mental locations at the state or event level.