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.

In many languages across the world, verbs reporting speech, thoughts and perceptions (also referred to as quotative verbs) grammaticalise into quote markers and/or complementisers. This paper analyses the change of the items kua and fen in the Austronesian languages Tukang Besi and Buru, as originally full lexical 'report' verbs that became open to reinterpretation as grammatical items after having undergone 'semantic bleaching'. It is proposed that the 'semantic bleaching', which crucially involves loss of argument structure, is caused by a mismatch between linguistic levels -here between surface syntax and lexical argument structure. The mismatch involves a violation of universal constraints on 'Semantic Transparency' and 'Structural Simplicity', and results in a reduced lexical representation of the report verb as a predicate without arguments. The multifunctional, polysemous character of this 'grammaticalised' item is now a consequence of its interaction with particular surface syntactic constructions. In other words, 'V to C' grammaticalisation is a structurally determined variable interpretation of a lexically impoverished item, and does not involve a change in category (labels) (contra Harris and Campbell, 1995:63; Reh, 1984: 37-38: see also Haspelmath, 1998: 327-328). This view of grammaticalised verbs as lexical forms with reduced argument structure may be extended to other areas of verb-grammaticalisation.The " I particularly wish to thank Miriam Butt and Miriam Meyerhoff and the Lingua reviewer, whose suggestions helped to shape this paper in its present form. I also thank the following people for their valuable comments and criticisms on the various predecessors of this paper or the talks reporting about it: Geert Booij, Joan Bresnan, Mark Donohue, Tom Giildemann. Bemd Heine, Gertjan Postma, Ger Reesmk, Nigel Vincent, Lourens de Vries, Jan-Wouter Zwart, and the participants of the HIL workshop on Quotative structures (Leiden, November 1998), especially Johan Rooryck. A short conference version of this paper is to appear in the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Austronesian Linguisttcs. held in Taipei similar path of grammaticalisation of report verbs across languages is explained by proposing a list of structural characteristics (of syntax and discourse) that appear to be relevant in allowing the grammaticalisation to take place. Genetically related languages may diverge because they differ in one (or more) of those characteristics: the report verb in Kambera, a language closely related to Buru and Tukang Besi, did not grammaticalise because of a different surface constituent order. 0

In this paper we consider how Eastern Indonesia may be treated as a linguistic area. We propose fi ve defi ning linguistic features and we discuss their occurrence in some 40 Austronesian (AN) and non-Austronesian (NAN) languages of South Sulawesi, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Alor and Pantar, the Moluccas, Halmahera, the Bird's Head, and the Cenderawasih Bay. We propose that of these fi ve areal features, three originally Papuan features have diff used into the Austronesian languages, while two Austronesian features have diff used into the Papuan languages. Th ese Papuan features are: (1) possessor-possessum order in adnominal possession, (2) overt marking of the distinction alienable vs. inalienable possession, and (3) clause-fi nal negation. While these features are not generally found in Austronesian, we will demonstrate that they occur in many Austronesian languages in East Nusantara and around the Bird's Head, as well as in the Papuan languages of this area. Th e Austronesian features are: (4) SVO as primary constituent order, and (5) an inclusive/exclusive opposition in the pronominal paradigm. Th ese features are not found in Papuan languages in general, yet they are attested in both the Papuan and the Austronesian languages of East Nusantara, as we will demonstrate. Although the features do not all converge on the same isoglosses, together they defi ne a linguistic area: East Nusantara. Th is area has Halmahera and the Bird's Head as its core, and radiates outwards to include the Moluccas and Alor/Pantar fi rst, followed by the island Timor. . Research for this project was fi nanced through two grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientifi c Research (NWO) and a grant from the European Science Foundation (ESFO). We wish to thank Pieter Muysken and ** for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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