General Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
D-50923 Cologne

E-Mail: esut[at]sunrise[dot]ch

Language History and Language Contact in North-East New Guinea

This project is preceded by my dissertation on the history of the morphology of the Huon languages. In it I have reconstructed the verbal inflection, the pronouns and the case indicators of the Proto-Huon. Now, the inherited vocabulary will also be reconstructed comprehensively, and on this basis, the historical phonology will be explored in more detail. The Huon languages are 21 in number and are spoken on the peninsula of the same name in northeastern Papua New Guinea. Their closest relatives are the approximately 40 languages spoken in the Finisterre Mountains extending from the Rai Coast in the west to the Huon Peninsula in the east. The handwritten word lists of the Finisterre languages, collected in the 1960s and 1970s by Claassen and McElhanon and by Z'graggen in the field, will be digitized in this project to make them available for historical-comparative analysis. In addition, two individual studies in comparative syntax on the Huon languages are planned. On the one hand, the Benefactive constructions and their diachronic relation to the Destinative case will be studied, and on the other hand, the syntactic origin of the verbal causative composites common in the languages of the Eastern Huon subfamily will be elicited. One of the languages is not spoken on the Huon Peninsula, but on Umboi Island on the other side of the Vitiaz Strait. Kovai differs in its grammar in many ways from the languages left behind on the Huon Peninsula. In cooperation with the Austronesian scholar Robert Bugenhagen, I would like to find out to what extent the grammar of Kovai has been changed by contact with neighboring Austronesian languages.