Malcolm Ross

Malcolm Ross
Australian National University | ANU · College of Asia & the Pacific

B.A. Hons (English) (Bristol), M. Litt. (Ed.) (Bristol), PhD (Linguistics) (ANU)

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135
Publications
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Introduction

Publications

Publications (135)
Article
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The Philippines are central to understanding the expansion of the Austronesian language family from its homeland in Taiwan. It remains unknown to what extent the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian languages has been shaped by back migrations and language leveling events following the initial Out-of-Taiwan expansion. Other aspects of language history...
Research
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CV
Article
Narrative historical linguistics (NHL) is considered as a valued contributor alongside history, archaeology, and genetics for an integrated study of human history. This chapter draws on work on the history of the vast Austronesian family, particularly its Oceanic subgroup. It discusses the working relation of NHL with other historical scholarship....
Chapter
The Language of Hunter-Gatherers - edited by Tom Güldemann February 2020
Chapter
Full-text available
Providing a contemporary and comprehensive look at the topical area of areal linguistics, this book looks systematically at different regions of the world whilst presenting a focussed and informed overview of the theory behind research into areal linguistics and language contact. The topicality of areal linguistics is thoroughly documented by a wea...
Article
Although morphological innovations are usually regarded as important in reconstructing the histories of language families, relatively little attention has been paid to the reconstruction of Proto Austronesian (PAn) verbal morphology, and this paper aims to take a step in this direction. Morphological classes of verbs have been reconstructed for sev...
Chapter
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Note (June 2024): This is a corrected version of the paper posted earlier. I have corrected an error in the table of sound correspondences. I am grateful to Laurent Sagart for drawing my attention to this.
Book
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This volume contains papers describing and discussing language change in the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia and Taiwan. The issues discussed include the unusual development of verbal infixes in the Cendrawasih Bay languages, dialect variations, patterns of borrowing and language contact in Taiwan and in Flores-Alor-Pantar languages of...
Article
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The first issue of Diachronica contained an evaluation of the comparative method as applied to “exotic” languages (Boretzky 1984). thirty years later, it is worth taking stock of what our discipline has accomplished and identifying future priorities and pressing issues that have (re-)emerged. The following represents the considered judgement of se...
Article
William Thurston (1982, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1994) analyzes the history of the languages of the northwest area of New Britain. This history has included much contact among the area’s languages, all of which are Oceanic Austronesian with the exception of the Papuan language Anêm. Thurston, however, took the position that all linguistic speciation is br...
Article
This paper addresses the questions, Do bilingually induced and shift-induced change have different outcomes? If they do, can these differences assist us in reconstructing the prehistoric past, specifically the linguistic prehistory of the (smallscale neolithic) societies of Melanesia. A key to better interpreting differences in the outputs of conta...
Article
Ross (2009) proposed the Nuclear Austronesian hypothesis, whereby Puyuma, Tsou and Rukai are each single-member first-order subgroups of Austronesian and all other Austronesian languages belong to a Nuclear Austronesian subgroup. The basis of this subgrouping is a complex innovation whereby certain Proto Austronesian nominalizers came also to mark...
Chapter
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This chapter examines the evidence for the movement of Austronesian-speaking peoples from Taiwan into the Philippines and beyond, drawing upon data from comparative linguistics, archaeology and genetics. The chronological focus is mainly on the period between 2500 and 1000 bc. These three disciplines in combination make a migration of Austronesian-...
Article
This paper argues for the reconstruction of a rounded velar protophoneme *k w in Proto-Oceanic. This protophoneme occurred, however, in few lexical items. In those reconstructed to date, it always appears before *a and always, with one possible exception, word-initially. The paper concludes with a discussion of the probable status of *k w in Proto-...
Article
Full-text available
2009) proposes the Nuclear Austronesian hypothesis, according to which the Formosan languages Puyuma, Rukai, and Tsou are each probably a primary branch of Austronesian and all Austronesian languages other than these three belong to a single, Nuclear Austronesian, branch defined by the nominalization-to-verb innovation originally proposed by Staros...
Book
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See website: https://sites.google.com/site/theoceaniclexiconproject/
Article
This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the tone system in East Kewa. The domain of tone in East Kewa is the morpheme, but like other New Guinea Highlands languages tone sandhi applies such that the tone of each morpheme affects the tone of the following morpheme. Like languages elsewhere in the world, East Kewa nouns display a larger paradig...
Article
Full-text available
The first of five volumes of papers presented at the Tenth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, held in Puerto Princesa on the Philippine island of Palawan in January 2006, this volume contains six papers by five authors: Isidore Dyen, John Wolff, Ronald Himes, Robert Blust, and Tom Laskowske. Two of the papers are by Wolff. The hi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A reconstruction of the history of the Bel languages, a group of papuanised Oceanic Austronesian languages of ther north coast of New Guinea. The reconstruction shows that the languages represent different stages in the papuanisation process.
Article
In earlier work Takia, an Oceanic Austronesian language, has been compared with its Papuan neighbour Waskia to show that much of the grammar of Takia can be explained as the outcome of metatypy on the model of Waskia or a language typologically like it. Takia belongs to the Western subgroup of the small Bel family, the members of which have all und...
Article
Full-text available
Whether the languages of the Reefs--Santa Cruz (RSC) group have a Papuan or an austronesian origin has long been in dispute. Various background issues are treated in the introductory section. In section 2 we examine the lexicon of the RSC and Utupua-Vanikoro languages and show that there are regular sound correspondences among these languages, and...
Article
Full-text available
Metatypy, meaning 'change in type' is a diachronic process in which the syntactic system of one of a bilingual community's languages is restructured so that it more closely resembles the syntax of its speakers' other language. It is thus a language contact phenomenon. In this paper I deconstruct my earlier account of metatypy and show that metatypy...
Article
Full-text available
Kazukuru is an extinct language, originally spoken in the inland of the western part of the island of New Georgia, Solomon Islands, and attested by very limited historical sources. Kazukuru has generally been considered to be a Papuan, that is, non-Austronesian, language, mostly on the basis of its lexicon. Reevaluation of the available data sugges...
Chapter
This volume in memory of Terry Crowley covers a wide range of languages: Australian, Oceanic, Pidgins and Creoles, and varieties of English. Part I, Linguistic Description and Typology, includes chapters on topics such as complex predicates and verb serialization, noun incorporation, possessive classifiers, diphthongs, accent patterns, modals in Au...
Article
Malcolm Ross is a Professor of Linguistics in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research on Language Change at the Australian National University in Canberra. He specializes in Austronesian and Papuan linguistics, as well as conducting research on wider issues in historical linguistics, particula...
Article
Full-text available
There is quite a longstanding convention whereby Formosan languages (the Austronesian languages of Taiwan) are described using a framework and termi-nology developed by linguists working on the Austronesian languages of the Philippines. Linguists using this terminology talk, for example, about the 'focus system' of verbal constructions and about th...
Article
Full-text available
The Batanic languages are a group of closely related Austronesian languages spoken on the small islands scattered between Taiwan and Luzon. The purpose of this paper is to present what is known of their relationships to other Austronesian groups, the Formosan languages to the north and the Malayo-Polynesian languages to the south. It is shown that...
Article
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The purpose of this paper is to apply Croft's (2001) Radical Construction Grammar approach to an analysis of the major clause types in Puyuma in order to show how a constructional approach can illuminate the relationship among constructions from a typological perspective. When we compare the Puyuma clause system with that of English, we find the cl...
Chapter
In Oceanic languages we often find directional elements which were originally directional verbs in serial verb constructions. The various grammaticization paths that have led to the modern constructions are described in this article. The grammaticized directional elements in modern languages are of three kinds: postverbal directional clitics ('dire...
Article
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The main goal of this paper is to describe some morphosyntactic characteristics that are common to a majority of Oceanic languages. Amidst the typological variety of Oceanic languages, the author defines a canonic language type, i.e., a type widely represented both genealogically and geographically. This type is SVO and has prepositions. Subjects a...
Article
In the article mentioned in the title, Klamer appears to say that typological features may be used to help determine whether a particular language is Austronesian or Papuan. I argue here that this is not so, as typological features are often shared as a result of language contact. Genealogical relatedness is demonstrated by the presence of what Joh...
Chapter
This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached f...
Article
Introduction: The goal of this chapter is to look at the possibility of using various patterns in comparative data to reconstruct different kinds of language contact. I ask the reader to forgive a somewhat autobiographical introduction, but this is the most direct way I know of explaining why this goal is worthy of pursuit. I spent much of the 1980...
Chapter
Two languages can resemble each other in the categories, constructions, and types of meaning they use, and in the forms they employ to express these. Such resemblances may be the consequence of universal characteristics of language, of chance or coincidence, of the borrowing by one language of another's words, or of the diffusion of grammatical, ph...
Article
In many Oceanic languages in northwest Melanesia the default attribute construction ('a big house') is one whose morphosyntax looks like that of a possession construction: the attribute occupies the (possessed) head slot, the noun the (possessor) modifier slot ('a big one of a house'), that is, the opposite of the cross-linguistic norm and a rare p...
Article
Full-text available
Probably all languages have at least one "adjectival" category, that is, a word class whose typical function is attribution, but, as Dixon (1977) has shown, languages vary considerably in the ways in which this category is related to other categories (especially nouns and verbs) and in the number of adjectival categories that the language possesses...
Book
Durie and Ross have drawn together previously unpublished papers by linguists engaged in historical reconstruction, on the subject of regularity and irregularity in the comparative method. A number of language families are represented.
Article
For 25 years it has been known that the Austronesian languages of the Sarmi and Jayapura groups in Irian Jaya belong to the Oceanic subgroup. It has also been suggested recently that they form a single low-order subgroup within Oceanic. It has not been clear, however, whether they form a first-order subgroup or belong to an already established grou...
Article
The overriding goal of the comparative method is to reconstruct linguistic prehistory and thereby to contribute to human culture history. Unfortunately, the method is blinkered in this endeavour by its prerequisites. It deals only with genetically related languages, and then only with regular correspondences among them. Yet the history of almost ev...

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