Aims and objectives: The paper describes the current multilingual language ecology and explores two subdomains of the lexicon in order to infer information about the extent and nature of multilingualism in the past. Methodology: The paper employs quantitative and qualitative analysis of a sociolinguistic questionnaire in the first part. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of lexemes in the domains of bird names and plant names, and then compares them with old ethnographic sources as well as recent information on the surrounding languages. Data: The data of this study come from original fieldwork by the author in the village of Rouku and surrounding villages collected between 2010 and 2016. It is supplemented by material from colleagues working on related languages (Evans, Kashima and Siegel). Findings: The method suggests that the type of multilingualism that was practiced in the past is similar to today. Originality: The study is novel in providing a description of multilingualism from the Southern New Guinea area. Moreover, it advances a lexicographic and ethnographic approach in reconstructing the past state of a language ecology. Implications: The main conclusion is that in the absence of written historical sources – a problem that one is almost always facing in New Guinea – it is possible to extrapolate from the lexicon of Komnzo to a past state of the local language ecology. Limitations: The method does not allow for dating the point in time for which the inferences can be made.

This article addresses the verb morphology of Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. It provides a description of verb indexing in Section 1, which is followed by a corpus analysis of a small class of verbs. Komnzo verb morphology encodes transitivity by distinct alignment patterns in the verb morphology, which I call ‘verb templates.’ Templates encode participant constellation, e.g. transitive or ditransitive, as well as event structure, e.g. dynamic versus stative. The system allows for some fluidity as to which lexemes can be used in which template. In addition to the description, the main contribution of the article lies in an in-depth examination of the interaction between lexical semantics and the morphological structure in Komnzo. This article takes an empirical approach, which draws on evidence from a text corpus of over 12 h of natural speech and comprises more than 12,000 inflected verb forms.

This chapter describes and analyses the expression of directed caused accompanied motion (directed CAM) in Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. The chapter focusses on the interaction between lexical semantics and verb morphology. It shows that the expression of CAM events revolves around a handful of very frequent lexical items (carry, fetch, return verbs), which can be placed in different morphological templates. Morphological fluidity provides a productive mechanism to derive causative alternations of intransitive motion verbs, i.e. an intransitive return verb can be used to express 'return something'. The chapter adopts a corpus linguistic approach to the phenomenon of CAM events by providing a fine-grained frequency analysis of the most important verb lexemes based on the Komnzo text corpus. Additionally, the chapter describes how the system of adverbial demonstratives and case markers contribute to expression of CAM events.

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