Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume I. Antoinette Schapper Universität zu Köln 1. Overview The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar are a small family comprising around 30 languages spoken by around 300,000 people in south-eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste (East Timor). Members of the family predominate on the islands of the Alor archipelago, consisting of Alor, Pantar and numerous small islands in the Pantar Strait. Other members are found interspersed among Austronesian languages on the islands of Timor and Kisar. 1 Lying some eight hundred kilometres from the New Guinea mainland as the crow flies, Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) languages are the western-most of the Papuan languages (Map 1). “Papuan” is a negative label indicating any language that is found in the area of New Guinea that does not belong to the Austronesian language family (Foley 1986:1). Map 1: The extent of Papuan languages (on and around New Guinea) This book is the result of an eventful last decade in TAP linguistics (see section 4). The volumes were conceived as a way for numerous researchers to bring the major descriptive results of their work together in a cohesive and focussed forum. All sketches are written by expert linguists based on their own original fieldwork into previously undescribed TAP 1 Wurm & Hattori (1982) list Adabe on the island of Atauro just east of Alor and north of Timor as being another Papuan language. Hull (1998: 3-4) suggests that this error came about through a misreading of an ambiguous missionary statement. A visit by myself to Adabe village on Atauro in 2007 yielded no trace of a Papuan language. David Penn (pers. comm.) states that his own survey work on Atauro found only a series of closely-related Austronesian dialects. 1 languages, and together provide an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the grammars of this Papuan “outlier” family. 2. The language scene On Timor, there are four TAP languages: Bunaq straddling the border between Indonesian West Timor and independent East Timor, and Makasae, Makalero and Fataluku occupying a contiguous region at the eastern tip of the island (Map 2). Close by to the north again in Indonesia, Oirata is a TAP language spoken on Kisar Island dominated by the Austronesian language, Meher. The Timor languages are by far and away the largest in the family: Bunaq, Fataluku and Makasae, together make up seventy per cent of TAP speakers. Although existing under the shadow of more dominant Austronesian languages, the Timor-Kisar languages are vigorous and still being learnt by children in the villages. It is clear that Timor groups have even significantly expanded in the modern period, taking over areas previously occupied by speakers of neighbouring Austronesian languages (McWilliam 2007, Engelenhoven 2010, Schapper 2011a). The Oirata language is itself the result of an historical migration of Fataluku speakers from the northern dialect area into Austronesian territory in Kisar. 2 The greatest concentration of TAP languages is in the Alor archipelago, with 26 Papuan languages on current counts (Map 3). This classification is based on a combination of mutual intelligibility, ethno-social considerations and non-trivial grammatical differences. Yet, the exact number of languages remains difficult to determine. This is due to two factors. Firstly, it is problematic sorting out mutual intelligibility from passive bilingualism in a context such as Alor-Pantar where multilingualism between neighbouring groups is the norm. Kamang, Suboo, Moo, Tiee and Manet in central Alor have in earlier classifications been marked as a single language (e.g., as Woisika in Stokhof (1975) on the basis of 117-item wordlists). The languages are indeed closely related (forming the North-central Alor language area, Schapper & Manimau 2011) and speakers typically claim partial passive competence in one or more of the other group’s speech. Still the differences are not superficial. Recent investigation has revealed significant differences in the details of the segmental phonology and morphology (such as in the number and functions of agreement paradigms) that appear to warrant each of them being regarded as an independent language. Secondly, in Alor-Pantar unique glottonyms that are widely recognised and accepted are lacking for many languages. Instead, a language may be referred to with the name of the clan that speaks it; for instance, Lamma, used by Stokhof (1975) and Nitbani et al. (2001), is a single clan within the larger Western Pantar language area (Holton this volume), or Tanglapui, used by Stokhof (1975) and Donohue (1996), is the name of one of four Kula-speaking clans. Alternatively, a language may be referred to by the name of the village where it is spoken or the geographical location of its speakers: for instance, the Wersing language is often designated locally as Bol, though this is a general label that can strictly be applied to any coastal group, while Wersing speakers themselves tend to refer to their language as Bahasa 2 Oirata, the village where the language of the same name is spoken is the result of a late migration from Timor. According to Dutch historical records, the Oirata arrived in Kisar in 1721, having fled from Loikera in the Fataluku-speaking area (Riedel 1886: 403). Still today the northern Fataluku dialect is claimed to be, at least partly, mutually intelligible with Oirata (Katrina Langford pers. comm.), though other Fataluku dialects appear to be too divergent (Aone van Englenhoven pers. comm.). 2 Kolana, Bahasa Pureman etc. after their respective villages of origin. In other cases, a language may be designated simply as our language, as is the case with many Blagar varieties (Steinhauer this volume). Map 2: The extent of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family Map 3: The Alor-Pantar languages 3 The largest and most vibrant of the Alor-Pantar languages are Abui and Western Pantar with 16,000 and 10,000 speakers respectively and active child acquisition. Other languages such as Nedebang are near-moribund with only a few dozen adult speakers remaining. For the majority of Alor-Pantar languages, the situation is not so dire but language shift is progressing. The typical situation in Alor-Pantar villages may be broadly characterised as follows: many adults still use the local languages regularly but switching to Malay/Indonesian is common particularly in addressing children; some but not all children acquire the local language but often only passively and prefer to use Malay/Indonesian with their peers. 3. Prehistory of the family The relatedness of the TAP languages has traditionally been assumed by scholars from their proximity. However, it was only very recently that the languages’ genetic unity has been shown by the comparative method (Schapper et al. forthcoming). The primary subgroups of the family, correlating with geography, are the Timor subgroup and the Alor-Pantar subgroup (Figure 1). Figure 1: Tree diagram of Timor-Alor-Pantar languages While the Timor subgroups are easily established (Schapper et al. 2012), the internal relationships of the Alor-Pantar languages are more complex and as yet little worked out. Figure 2 presents a possible tree of the Alor-Pantar subgroup, synthesising the results of a variety of comparative studies of phonology and morphology (Donohue & Schapper 2007, 2008, Holton et al. 2012, Robinson & Holton 2010, Robinson & Holton 2013, Schapper forthcoming, Schapper & Klamer forthcoming, Steinhauer 1995) as well as ongoing reconstructive work. Within the Alor-Pantar subgroup, the West Alor subgroup and the lower nodes within Central-East Alor and Central-North Pantar subgroups seem relatively secure and well-defined. The high-level nodes for Pantar and Alor are shaky. The position of Western Pantar, Nedebang, Kui-Kiraman and Abui-Papuna languages is also extremely problematic. Subsequent work will likely revise their constituency within the Alor-Pantar tree, possibly in favour of a flatter structure with ‘linkages’, resulting from layered innovations with entangled patterns of distributions between languages. 4 Figure 2: Possible tree diagram of the Alor-Pantar languages Despite the genetic unity of the family now being clear, the prehistory of the Timor-AlorPantar languages remains largely obscure. The origin and timing of the arrival of the ancestors of TAP-speaking peoples in the Timor area is a matter of particular conjecture. It is generally thought that the TAP languages are the descendents of the languages of the autochthonous peoples preceding the Austronesian arrival after 2000 BCE. 3 They may be a remnant of the languages spoken by the first settlers of the area who arrived in the Pleistocene more than 40,000 years ago (O’Connor 2007). However, it may also be that the proto-TAP peoples themselves had arrived from New Guinea as part of an expansion powered by the development of taro and banana agriculture in the eastern Highlands of New Guinea around 8000 BCE (Pawley 2005). On the back of these agriculture advances, the languages of the Trans New Guinea (TNG) Phylum are thought to have spread along the central cordillera of New Guinea and then to the Timor region. There are around a dozen pTNG lexical items that that have look-alikes in modern TAP languages (Pawley & Hammarström forthcoming). The lexical similarities are not enough to establish the regular sound correspondences demanded by the comparative method, but they do seem to point to some connection between TAP and mainland TNG languages. However, the weakness of the signal may just be a reflection of the great time-depth that presumably separates the TAP languages from pTNG, leaving the TNG hypothesis as it touches on TAP unfalsifiable. Robuster evidence of a TNG relationship might be found by comparing pTAP with a lower level, more closely related subgroup within the TNG Phylum. Like TAP languages, the Papuan languages of West Bomberai have been tentatively grouped into the TNG “Western Linkage” by Ross (2005). 4 Within the linkage TAP and West Bomberai are seen to group together because of the shared innovation of a 1st person plural pronoun *bi (Ross 2005:36), 3 4 McWilliam (2007) suggests that the Fataluku in eastern Timor may represent a post-Austronesian arrival in Timor. This is, however, at odds with the genetic unity of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family and in particular conflicts with the clear subgrouping of Fataluku with Makasae and Makalero. As argues by Schapper (2011b), the Austronesian cultural patterns observed amongst the Fataluku by McWilliam can readily be explained as the outcome of significant and prolonged contact with a more prestigious neighbouring cultural group. The possibility of a TNG link between TAP and Bomberai languages was first floated by Hull (2004). 5 reflected as pTAP *pi ‘1PL.INCL’ (Schapper et al. forthcoming) and Iha mbi ‘1PL.INCL’ (Mark Donohue pers. comm.). There is also archeological evidence linking the Timor region and the Bomberai peninsula, with a striking similarity observed in rock art motifs in eastern Timor and West Bomberai (O’Connor 2003). The relationship between TAP languages and Papuan languages of West Bomberai deserves serious attention following more complete reconstructions of the two proto-languages, with which the TNG hypothesis can be tested at its lowest level (see Robinson and Holton 2012a for a preliminary attempt at this). Only with this will we bring some serious historical perspective –most importantly the application of the comparative method– to the validity of TNG at its claimed fringes. The outlying position of the TAP languages means that they have had a different history from that of many mainland New Guinea Papuan languages. In particular, they have been in close contact with Austronesians languages for at least 2,000 years and this has wrought many changes on the languages that have only begun to be explored (e.g., in Engelenhoven 2010, Klamer 2012, McWilliam 2007, Schapper 2011a, 2011b). A major question in the history of TAP-Austronesian interaction is how the speakers of TAP languages resisted the incoming tide of Austronesians. The conventional understanding of Austronesian history involves the expansion across eastern Indonesia, overwhelming pre-existing sparse populations of Papuan hunter-gatherers and transforming them into speakers of Austronesian languages (Bellwood 1998). Yet the TAP languages survive today, and we may speculate that their speech communities possessed some characteristics that allowed them to maintain themselves in the face of the Austronesian arrival. An incumbent agriculturist population (see Oliveira 2008 on the signs of early Holocene agriculture, such as domesticated taro Colocasia esculenta, in Timor) or a highly organised maritime culture (see Schapper & Huber 2012 for this suggestion) would perhaps allow resistance against the incoming Austronesians. It is hoped that further comparative-historical research may shed light on this issue. 4. History of study of the family The TAP languages remained in almost complete obscurity until decades into the 20th century. The earliest publication with data from a TAP language was the short wordlists in Anonymous (1914) and in Vatter (1932), but without recognition of the languages’ Papuan character. It was Josselin de Jong’s (1937) monograph and that first identified the presence of Papuan languages with Oirata on Kisar and by implication Fataluku on Timor which Josselin de Jong recognised as a close relative. Nicolspeyer (1940) provided the first glossed texts of a TAP language and hinted at the Papuan character of the Abui language. This was followed by Capell’s (1943) identification of Bunaq and Makasae on Timor as Papuan. The Papuan classification of the Alor-Pantar languages lagged behind: they were still marked as Austronesian in Salzner’s (1960) Sprachenatlas des Indopazifischen Raumes, but by the time of Wurm and Hattori’s (1982) monumental Language atlas of the Pacific area all were given as Papuan (following Stokhof 1975; see below). Detailed work on the TAP languages began only after World War II. António de Almeida, head of the Portuguese Missão Antropológica de Timor, collected word lists and elicited sentences in most languages of the Portuguese-held part of Timor between 1953 and 1975 (partly published as Almeida 1994). Alfonso Nacher, a priest at the Missão Salesiana in Fuiloro, who compiled a dictionary of Fataluku in the period between 1955 and 1968 (published as Nacher 2003, 2004, and then again as Nacher 2012). Louis Berthe started field 6 work on Bunaq in what is today Indonesia West Timor between 1957 and 1959 and published a range of anthropological linguistic materials (Berthe 1959, 1963, 1972). Berthe returned to Timor between 1966 and 1967 leading a multi-disciplinary team, with Henri Campagnolo who produced the first in-depth grammatical description of Fataluku (Campagnolo 1973) and Claudine Friedberg who studied ethno-linguistic classification of plants amongst the Bunaq (1970, 1972, 1974, 1979, 1990). On Alor and Pantar, linguistic documentation took off in the 1970s. A better view of the Pantar languages was gained with the word lists in Watuseke (1973) and the fieldwork completed by James Fox (nd) between 1972 and 1973. Extensive fieldwork was carried out by Wim Stokhof and Hein Steinhauer as part of a project from Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (see Steinhauer & Stokhof’s 1976 project report). Out of this project, first came Stokhof (1975) containing 34 word lists taken from a range of locations across the Alor-Pantar languages. Stokhof’s fieldwork was concentrated in Alor and resulted in a significant body of materials on Kamang under the name Woisika (Stokhof 1977, 1978, 1979, 1982, 1983), as well as short texts in Abui (Stokhof 1984) and Kabola (Stokhof 1987). Steinhauer’s fieldwork concentrated on Blagar, working chiefly on the Dolabang dialect of Pura Island (Steinhauer 1977, 1991, 1993, 1999, 2010), but also collected materials on the Bukalabang dialect on Pantar (Steinhauer 1995). No new work was carried out on TAP languages in the 1980s. The 1990s saw the Indonesian national Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Centre for Language Development and Cultivation, later renamed Pusat Bahasa ‘Centre for Language’ 5) conducted research on a range of TAP languages. The centre’s fieldwork resulted in a general survey on the languages of Timor (Sudiartha et al. 1994), error-ridden sketches of Bunaq (Sawardo et al. 1996) and of Makasae (Sudiartha et al. 1998), as well as survey word lists of the languages of Alor (Martis et al. 2000) and a problematic sketch of Lamma (Nitbani et al. 2001). Other than these only a few studies appeared: Donohue (1996, 1997) on Kula, Wersing and Kui, and Marques (1990) with a primer of Makasae. The turn of the century saw a huge boom in TAP linguistics, with a surge in descriptive work by a suite of linguists from around the world. Within a decade, modern grammatical descriptions have been produced for over half a dozen TAP languages: Haan’s (2001) Adang grammar, Huber’s (2005) Makasae grammar (later published as Huber 2008), Kratochvíl’s (2007) Abui grammar, Baird’s (2008) Klon grammar, Schapper’s (2010) Bunaq grammar, Klamer’s (2010) Teiwa grammar, and Huber’s (2011) Makalero grammar. Additional materials and several monograph-length treatments of particular topics have also appeared for these TAP languages as well as others. Most significant are: for Abui, an introductory dictionary (Kratochvíl & Delpada 2008a) and texts (Kratochvíl and Delpada 2008b); for Bunaq, a short dictionary (Bele 2009); for Fataluku, a monolingual dictionary (Valentim 2002), primer materials and texts (Valentim 2001a, 2001b, 2004a, 2004b); for Kamang, an introductory dictionary (Schapper & Manimau 2011); for Makalero, a short dictionary (Pinto 2004) and a primer (Pinto 2007); for Makasae, Masters theses on space (Brotherson 2003) genres (Carr 2004) and phonology (Fogaça 2011), a primer (Hull 2005), and two short dictionaries (Ximenes and Menezes 2002, Hull & Correira 2006); for Oirata, a sketch with 5 Subsequent to these publications, this institution was rebranded Badan Pengembangan dan Pembinaan Bahasa. 7 Josselin de Jong’s (1937) text glossed (Faust 2005), and a historical phonological treatment (Mandala 2010); for Teiwa, an extended word list (Klamer 2011); for Western Pantar, an introductory dictionary (Holton and Lamma Koly 2008). 5. Basic typological overview Out of this great surge of work, we have a broader picture of the variation and diversity of the TAP languages. This section presents a short, but by no means comprehensive, typological overview of the family. It functions as a taster to the descriptions found in these volumes. TAP languages have crosslinguistically inconspicuous phonologies. Consonantal inventories are moderately small with an average of 13-16 consonant phonemes. The largest consonant inventory is found in Western Pantar with 16 simple plus 10 geminate consonant phonemes, followed by Teiwa 20 (non-geminate) consonant phonemes. Makalero has the smallest consonant inventory with only 11 phonemes, and is unique in entirely lacking a voicing distinction in its plosives. Glottal stop is universally present in the phoneme inventories of Timor languages (although lost in some individual dialects), but only sporadically found in Alor-Pantar. Velar nasals are absent in Timor languages, but are frequently present in Alor-Pantar, though often have dubious phonemic status (e.g., Western Pantar, Kaera) or are clear allophones of /n/ (e.g., Wersing). Fricatives in most languages are limited to /s/ and /h/, with sporadic occurrences of (bi)labial fricatives (e.g., Teiwa, Makalero, Fataluku), /z/ (e.g., Blagar and Bunaq), /x/ (e.g., Teiwa and Kaera). Unusual consonants are /ћ/ and /q/ in Teiwa, /ɓ/ in Blagar and Reta, and /ɖ/ in Oirata. Vowel systems are varied. Most common in the TAP family are systems with five cardinal vowels and a length distinction for all qualities (e.g., Teiwa, Kaera, Kui, Abui and Kamang), though in some languages long vowels are only marginal (e.g., Blagar and Makalero). Five cardinal vowel systems with no length distinction are found in Western Pantar, Wersing, Bunaq, Makasae and Fataluku. Contrasting heights of mid-vowels are rare, found in Adang (seven vowel phonemes with two mid-vowels front and back and no length distinction) and Klon (12 vowels with marginal short /e/ and /ɔ/ contrasting with /ɛ, ɛː/ and /o, oː/). Unusual vowels are Sawila front-rounded /y, yː/ contrasting with five short and long cardinal vowels, and Kula extra-short central vowels /ɪ/ and /ɐ/ contrasting with five full cardinal vowels. Bunaq is atypical in having three phonemic diphthongs that contrast with sequences of the same vowels. The most common syllable structures are (C)V and (C)VC, frequently with restrictions on the consonants permitted in codas. In most languages, consonant clusters are rare, even across syllable boundaries. Where there are underlying clusters, surface phonotactic processes often exist to break them up (e.g., vowel epenthesis in Klon and Wersing). Unusual features are the extensive appearance of echo vowels in Wersing to avoid final codas, and the productive morphophonemic process of high vowel metathesis found Bunaq and Wersing to maintain a CV structure in certain affixation environments. A range of stress systems are found in TAP languages Non-phonemic stress comes in different forms: penultimate stress is found in Western Pantar, Blagar and Bunaq, final stress in Kaera, and weight-sensitive stress in Klon and Abui. Fully or at least partially phonemic stress is also found in Alor-Pantar languages such as Teiwa, Kamang and Sawila. Tone is 8 almost unknown in the TAP languages. A pitch-accent system is reported for one dialect of Fataluku (Stoel 2007), and tone is said to play a limited lexical role in a few domains of Abui. Morphological profiles show significant variation across the family. Makasae is highly isolating with no productive morphology whatsoever. Teiwa and Bunaq have inflectional morphology limited to a single paradigm of person prefixes that appear on some verbs and nouns (Teiwa eight prefixes and Bunaq five), while Makalero has a single 3rd person prefix appearing on a highly restricted number of verbs. At the other extreme, Abui and Kamang have five and seven paradigms of person prefixes respectively. West Alor languages typically have three paradigms, east Alor two paradigms and Pantar one paradigm. Abui and Kamang are also unique in each having several aspectual and dependency-marking suffixes. Elsewhere such morphology is limited: A single dependency suffix is found in both Kaera and Blagar, a realis suffix in Teiwa and Wersing, and aspectual prefixes are known in Western Pantar. Derivational morphology is, with some exceptions, limited in the family. A causative prefix is found in Adang, a causative suffix in Kaera, and both a causative prefix and suffix that are used in concert on some verbs in Blagar. Whilst lacking in many languages (e.g., Western Pantar, Kaera, Blagar, Abui and Bunaq), applicatives are still relatively widespread in the family: Adang and Teiwa have one applicative prefix, Klon, Kamang and Wersing two, and Sawila three; Fataluku and Makalero have more than a dozen applicative-like locative prefixes that attach to verbs triggering consonant mutations on them. Nominalising suffixes of some productivity are found in Blagar, Makalero and Fataluku. Fataluku and Oirata are distinct for having a large number of precategorical roots that must be marked with one of two suffixes depending on whether their use is nominal or verbal. Kula and Sawila are unique in the family in having lexicalised forms of many verbs and nouns depending on whether they occur in phrase-final or non-final position. Kaera has a related but distinct phenomenon: vowel suffixes mark phrase-final verbs ending in a consonant. TAP systems of morphological alignment hold especial typological interest due to their diversity and the frequent appearance of elements of semantic alignment. Outside of Alor, TAP languages have one prefixal agreement paradigm with a range of different alignment patterns. Western Pantar has a very fluid alignment system in which S, A or P can be an agreement prefix on the verb with different prefixation choices reflecting different levels of participant volitionality and effectedness (Holton 2010). Blagar has accusative alignment with only P ever being marked on the verb, while languages such as Bunaq, Teiwa and Kaera have “leaky” accusativity, in which prefixes on most verbs agree with P, but there are also small classes of S-agreement verbs. In western and central Alor, most languages have multiple agreement paradigms. For instance, Klon has three, Abui five, and Kamang six that can be used for either S or P. Multiple paradigms means that these languages don’t just have one coding ‘split’, but multiple splits in the prefixation of S and P with varying degrees of semantic flexibility versus lexical stipulation in the individual languages. Kula and Sawila have partly lexicalised inverse alignment systems involving an inverse prefix na- in combination with different agreement paradigms. Wersing has one agreement paradigm obligatorily agreeing with S, P or A depending on the lexical verb, but a second semantically governed agreement paradigm that exists alongside this encoding “inceptive agents”. TAP languages present a relatively uniform word order profile. All languages have SV/APV word order, postpositions and a basic head-initial NP. Major differences in the word order of the clause can be observed in the verb finalness in the languages: whilst TAP 9 languages typically allow a few elements to appear after the verb, most prominently the clausal negator and TAME markers, eastern Timor languages are strictly verb final with all such elements occurring before the clausal verb. At the other extreme, Bunaq, in central Timor, permits a great many elements to follow the verb, with strings of up to eight postverbal elements encoding aspect, temporal duration, manner, addition, polarity and information being observed. Within the NP, word order differences are minimal. All TAP languages have basic GEN N, N ATTR 6, N DEM/ART and N NUM word orders. Individual languages may show optional deviations from this. For instance: Abui demonstratives can precede the noun in some limited contexts; Fataluku has a set of demonstrative particles that precede the noun as well as a set of determiners that follow it as well as distinct pre-posed and post-posed possessor constructions; Bunaq allows some possessors to be post-posed and has a set of deictic “locational” morphemes that precede the noun. In TAP languages, nouns are typically unmarked for case, number, and gender. Exceptions are: Makalero and Fataluku have plural marking suffixes available on a small number of, predominantly kinship, nouns, and Makalero and Kamang have associative plural suffixes; Bunaq has a covert grammatical gender system based on an animate-inanimate distinction expressed on determiners and verbal agreement. Possessive classification in which a lexically determined subset of nouns, typically kinship and body part nouns, gets distinctive possessor coding is found in all TAP languages. Languages such as Teiwa, Wersing and Makalero have only one way of marking possession: most nouns are only optionally marked with the possessor prefix, whilst a small class are obligatory marked by it. Other languages have two distinct ways of marking possessors, one for optionally possessed alienable nouns and one for obligatorily possessed inalienable nouns. In languages such as Blagar, Klon and Bunaq, the alienable possessor is encoded “indirectly” by means an inflected free possessor classifier, while inalienable possessors are encoded “directly” by a means of a prefix on the possessed noun. In other languages such as Abui, two different sets of prefixes encode alienable and inalienable nouns respectively. In some cases, systems are more complex. In Western Pantar and Kamang, for instance, there are the usual two classes that are optionally and obligatorily possessors encoded in two different ways respectively, plus a third class which is obligatorily possessed, but uses the markers of the optional and not the obligatorily class. Amongst the most interesting linguistic phenomena in TAP languages are their intricate deictic systems involving features such as visibility, knowledge, contrastiveness, distance, and elevation. Whilst elevation distinctions are common in Papuan languages, the TAP systems are remarkable for their complexity, incorporating three elevational heights (above, below and level with the deictic centre), often with multiple sub-terms within an elevational height distinguishing features such as distance (Abui), steepness of the slope (Western Pantar, Kamand), and directionality (traversing across the slope or directly following it; Makasae, Kamang, Sawila and Kula). Many TAP languages also do not limit their elevational distinction to a single set of elevational terms, but reiterate the elevational distinctions across multiple parts of the lexicon: Blagar marks elevation in a total of 10 paradigms, Western Pantar eight, and Makasae in seven (see Schapper forthcoming for further discussion). 6 The label “attribute” is used here rather than because most TAP languages lack a distinct class of adjectives. Relative clauses are also often absent. 10 A final important aspect of TAP languages is the prevalence of serial verb constructions. These are used to encode additional participants, cause, manner, direction, result and aspect, to name just a few functions they have in the clause. The distinction between postpositions and participant-adding serial verbs is often not well-articulated in TAP languages and the array of variation in the languages provides fascinating material for the grammaticalisation cline between verb and postposition. Bunaq, for instance, has a large set of “verbal postpositions” which have verb-like inflectional properties, but lack the ability to occur as independent clausal predicates. In other languages such as Kamang, we find both true postpositions and a postposition-like light verb that has a reduced, non-inflecting form occurring clause-medially adding participants. Other light verbs in TAP languages have become fused with other serial verbs (Blagar, Teiwa), become obligatory markers of certain roles (Makasae, Fataluku) and in other cases have become prefixes on verbs (Makalero, see Klamer and Schapper 2012 for a treatment of this variation in one TAP serialisation construction). 6. This book Despite the profusion of activity in TAP linguistics, there remains little data on the TAP languages in wide circulation among linguists. Published descriptions of TAP languages still only cover a small number of languages and do not capture the full extent of the diversity within the family. These volumes bring together grammatical descriptions of previously undescribed TAP languages, thus providing a comprehensive overview of the variation across the entire TAP family and bringing to light the many noteworthy features of individual TAP languages. Sketch chapters are highly structured, with each author providing information on the same important topics in the family: phonology, clause structure, noun phrases, verbal morphology in particular person-number prefixes, independent pronouns, serial verb constructions, and TAME marking. Readers with interests in diverse topics such as stress systems, reduplication, demonstratives and deixis, numeral systems, agreement and alignment, as well as verb serialisation and more, will discover aspects of the TAP languages captivating and stimulating. TAP linguistics is a relatively new field and its terminology still shows flux (e.g., pronominal prefixes versus agreement prefixes). The largely parallel structures of chapters, however, allow the reader to directly compare phenomena between languages. Detailed tables of contents at the beginning of each chapter enable the reader to navigate quickly to treatments of desired topics. IPA has been used in the phonology sections of all sketches, but other sections use the individual orthographies of the different authors. Readers should keep in mind these potential differences. This volume, Volume I, presents the first published grammar overviews of seven languages of the Alor-Pantar (AP) subgroup. These cover the full geographic spread of the AP languages: Western Pantar (Holton this volume) located in south-west of Pantar, Kaera (Klamer this volume) in north-east, Blagar (Steinhauer this volume) in eastern Pantar and dispersed throughout the straits between Pantar and Alor, Kamang (Schapper this volume) in north-central Alor, and Sawila (Kratochvíl this volume) and Wersing (Schapper and Hendery this volume) situated in the far south-east of Alor. Map 4 illustrates the extent of coverage by the sketches by giving an overview of the major fieldwork sites and places of study in this 11 volume. Volume II presents descriptions of additional Alor languages and the major languages of the Timor subgroup of the family. Map 4: Major field sites and places of study in this volume Together, these volumes represent a significant advancement for descriptive Papuan linguistics. There is still ground to be covered before we have a complete picture of the TAP languages, but with the appearance of these volumes we now have descriptions for around three quarters of the family, making it one of the best described Papuan families. That said, almost all aspects of the TAP languages are in need of future analytic work. Investigations of phonetics, semantics, discourse and sociolinguistics remain all but non-existent in the TAP languages. Comprehensive comparative study of the lexicon and grammar has until recently been impossible. This will also aid in the comparison of TAP with other Papuan languages, and contribute to the construction of a better picture of Island Southeast Asian and Melanesian prehistory. References Almeida, António de. 1994. O Oriente de Expressão Portugesa. Lisbon: Fundação Oriente e Centro de Estudos Orientais. Anonymous. 1914. De eilanden Alor en Pantar, Residentie Timor en Onderhoorigheden. 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