austronesian culture and history

Armu. Rev. Anthropol. 1993. 22:425-59Copyright 1993 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

AUSTRONESIAN HISTORICALLINGUISTICS AND CULTUREHISTORY

Andrew Pawley and Malcolm Ross

Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian NationalUniversity, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia

KEY WORDS: Austronesian, historical linguistics, culture history, methods

INTRODUCTIONAbout one sixth of the world's languages are Austronesian (AN), but it is theircultural and biological diversity and their predominantly insular distribution,and not their numbers, that have made the Austronesian-speaking peoples ofgreat interest to anthropologists. In westem Melanesia, for instance, there aremany small, culturally and biologically heterogeneous communities living insustained intensive contact with speakers of non-AN languages and with eachother. In Polynesia, on the other hand, sister populations have diverged inisolation. "Islands as laboratories" has long been a popular catchcry amongscholars working in Polynesia (69, 108, 113, 161, 179-181, 195, 227, 228).For those searching for principles of change or seeking to reconstruct events ofculture history, each isolated Polynesian isleuid or island group has the value ofbeing a relatively independent witness to the effects of variables such asgeography, technology, population size, and time on a common ancestral base.

Although it lacks the elegant simplicity of its Polynesian part, the widerAN-speaking region provides extremely rich material for culture historiansand typologists. Perhaps 5000-6000 years ago Proto Austronesian (PAN) wasspoken, almost certainly somewhere in East or Southeast Asia, by a neolithicpopulation (7, 8, 236). Some AN speakers became the world's first efficientlong distance navigators (7, 153, 206) and over several millennia the family

0084-6570/93/1015-0425$05.00 425

426 PAWLEY & ROSS

scattered around two thirds of the earth's circumference, from Madagascar toEaster Island, and over 70 degrees of latitude, from Taiwan and Hawaii toNew Zealand. In Island Southeast Asia,' AN languages largely replaced in-cumbent speech traditions. In the Central Pacific and in Madagascar, ANspeakers settled islands that previously had lain beyond the reach of Homosapiens. In westem Melanesia, known to have been settled for more than40,0(X) years (3), AN speakers had a lesser impact but established themselvesin many coastal regions of New Guinea and on almost all the smaller islands.During this diaspora, as the colonists encountered other peoples and culturesand adapted to new ecological contexts, there was a considerable diversifica-tion in technology, social organization, cosmology, and biological makeup, aswell as language (7, 9,10, 34,72,161, 162,171,192,200, 244).

The culture historian seeks to make sense ofthe similarities and differencesexhibited by AN speakers, aligning evidence provided by different disciplines.This task is made difficult by two types of methodological problems. First,there are some large gaps in the data provided by each of the contributingfields of study. Second, there are problems of synthesis. Whereas each disci-pline and subdiscipline has it own kinds of data and an array of techniques forinterpreting these data, culture history has no adequate procedures for marry-ing the evidence of different disciplines.

The AN region does provide some especially favorable contexts for com-paring the findings of two ofthe pillars of culture historical research: archaeol-ogy and historical linguistics. However, relations between the disciplines areuneasy. For example, Diebold (74:19-20) refers to a "chronic alienation"between archaeologists and linguists concerned with reconstructing Indo-European prehistory. Green (131) observes that many Pacific archaeologistsbelieve that each discipline should stick to its last t^hat synthesis is rarelyfeasible because archaeology and linguistics operate with such different dataand methods. There are linguists who think likewise.

In most syntheses of Holocene culture history in Island Southeast Asia andthe Pacific (7-11, 29, 150, 204, 205, 220, 232, 234, 239) historical linguisticshas provided much of the main storyline. This is particularly true for nonmate-rial culture: no other discipline has quite such coherent tales to tell. Thecomments of an archaeologist writing about Indo-European prehistory fit theAustronesian scene equally well: "there is a sort of horrible irony in the factthat, while modem archaeologists are greatly interested in reconstructing tbesocial systems of prehistoric peoples, historical linguists offer the archaeolo-gists such detailed reconstructions that they are still beyond archaeologicalretrieval even when we know what to look for" (175:122-123). Archaeology

1Island Southeast Asia comprises Indonesia (except Irian Jaya), Malaysia, the Phillippines and

Taiwan.

AUSTRONESIAN HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS 427

in the Austronesian region started much later than linguisticsin most areaslittle or no work was done before the 1950s or 1960sand it is understandablethat many archaeologists at this stage prefer to write their own stories. But it isdifficult to see how culture historians can avoid the responsibility of evaluat-ing competing interpretations of their materials against the full range of evi-dence provided by all the relevant disciplines.

Blust (29) points out instances in which archaeological and linguistic evi-dence may yield directly comparable evidence and so corroborate or contradicteach other's conclusions. For example, the suite of artifacts recovered from asite may be compared with the names for artifacts reconstructible from cognatesets and attributable to an earlier linguistic stage. There are other domainswhere their testimony may be usefully complementary. Unlike reconstructedlanguages, archaeological assemblages may be associated with secure loca-tions and reasonably secure dates and the artifacts themselves will revealdetails of culture and culture change not recoverable from linguistic compari-sons. On the other hand, in any prehistoric culture there are many elementssuch as social categories, belief systems, and easily perishable artifacts that arenot directly accessible to archaeological methods but may be partly recover-able from reconstructed vocabulary. Then again, archaeologists sometimesfind it hard to decide whether a sequence of assemblages in a region showscontinuity of tradition (with internally generated change) or discontinuities(the intrusion of foreign traditions). A good example from the Pacific is therecent debate on the origins of the cultural complex associated with Lapitapottery.

This highly distinctive ceramic tradition appears in the second half of thesecond millennium BC in South Pacific sites spread over 4500 km from theBismarck Archipelago to West Polynesia. One school of thought believes thatthe core elements of the Lapita cultural complex derive, with some localadaptation, from an intrusive cultural tradition brought into the BismarckArchipelago by AN speakers from Southeast Asia. Another school argues thatmost elements in the Lapita assemblages continue traditions that were estab-lished in the Bismarck Archipelago or New Guinea area well before theappearance of Lapita pottery. Proponents of the AN intrusion interpretationargue that historical linguistics strongly supports their view. Supporters oflocal continuity prefer to treat the Lapita issue as a purely archaeologicalmatter, to which linguistic evidence is irrelevant, or to aver that the linguisticevidence is itself unsound or inconclusive. Certainly, the appeal to linguisticevidence can only be decisive in this debate if particular archaeological assem-blages can be securely associated with particular linguistic traditions.

Linguistics and comparative ethnography each contribute in different waysto reconstructions of social organization: one reconstructs terminologies forparticular linguistic stages and the other elucidates the range of behaviors and

428 PAWLEY & ROSS

ideologies cissociated with types of terminologies. Many anthropologists andlinguists have risen to the challenge presented by the AN speakers' diversity insocial structure (e.g. 34, 51, 97, 98, 100, 108, 112, 113, 177, 183, 185, 186,227-229). Some studies rely on typology as the basis for historical inferences.Murdock (185, 186) believed that his sample of AN-speaking societies pro-vides forceful evidence supporting his method of reconstructing the develop-ment of kinship system types. In a study of "adaptive radiation" in Polynesiansocieties, Sahlins (228) sought to correlate differences in social stratificationwith differences in economic and social conditions imposed by environmentaldifferences, e.g. between large, fertile, high islands and small islands andatolls. In another paper (229), he argued that Polynesians and Melanesianshave different types of political structures with different potentials for change.

It is noticeable, however, that much writing on culture history is marred bya weak understanding of linguistic methods, which sometimes results in anuncritical use of linguistic data or an uncritical acceptance of speculativeproposals made by certain linguists. There is uncertainty about what each ofthe methods of comparative linguisticsprincipally, the genetic comparativemethod, internal reconstruction, dialect geography, typological comparison,lexicostatistics, and the age-area methodis good for. The most recurrentmisuses of linguistic evidence in reconstructing social organizations are prob-ably those that stem from a confusion between the genetic and typologicalcomparative methods of reconstructing elements of prehistoric cultures. It isperhaps not widely understood that the genetic comparative method operateson radically different principles from the typological method and that, whenthe data it requires are plentiful, the former is a far more reliable instrument ofhistorical reconstruction. (Equally, it must be said that without ample data, thegenetic method cannot be applied rigorously.)

The limitations of comparative typology for sociological reconstruction arewell illustrated by attempts (94,177, 186) to reconstruct early Malayo-Polyne-sian or early Oceanic patterns of sibling classification on the basis of thegeographical distribution and statistical frequency of certain structural types.The conclusion was drawn that early Oceanic speakers did not distinguishterms for older and younger same-sex siblings or separate male and femaleterms for cross-siblings. As several commentators have observed (41, 60, 62,66), these conclusions are powerfully contradicted by the distribution acrosssubgroups of cognate terms for these same distinctions.

In this review we examine research in AN historical linguistics that carriesimplications for culture history, focusing equally on the facts and theories thathave emerged from empirical research and on questions of method and evalu-ation. We treat four linguistic domains especially germane to culture historicalreconstruction: I. the genetic comparative method, 2. subgrouping, 3. lexicalreconstruction, and 4. continuity and change. These domains bear on several


broad questions: Where and when were PAN and later interstages spoken?What can be inferred about the society, technology, and physical environmentof speakers of PAN and AN interstage languages from reconstructions ofvocabulary? Which features of a particular culture (contemporary or attestedby archaeological or linguistic reconstructions) represent continuity of an an-cestral tradition and which represent innovations? Why have some AN lan-guage-culture systems been much more conservative than others?

A NOTE ON RECENT GROWTH IN AUSTRONESIANLINGUISTICS

The existence of the AN family was recognized as early as 1708, from wordlists brought to Europe from Madagascar, Indonesia, and Polynesia (144,216).During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, research onthe family went on at a leisurely pace. The high point of comparative work inthis period was the publication in the 1930s of a three-volume study of ANhistorical phonology and the reconstruction of some 2000 PAN roots withsupporting cognate sets by the German scholar, Dempwolff (73,73a,b).

In the 1950s and 1960s the pace picked up. Indonesian studies have longhad academic centers at the Universities of Leiden and Hamburg, but until themiddle of the twentieth century, most of the descriptive and comparative workin AN was done by amateurs, chiefly missionary scholars. After World War na handful of professional linguists entered the field in the United States, theUnited Kingdom, and the Antipodes, and highly productive research centersemerged at the Universities of Auckland and Hawaii, the Australian NationalUniversity, and later, at the Language Center in Jakarta. A number of joumalsand publication series specializing in Austronesian or Pacific languages werefounded, including Oceanic Linguistics, Pacific Linguistics, Philippine Jour-nal of Linguistics, Nusa, and Language and Linguistics in Melanesia. Regularinternational conferences have been held since 1974. Of the 1600 or so entriesin a recent select Austronesian bibliography representing research done overthe last 150 years (56), over 70% are dated after 1970.

Looking at works written around 1970 gives a sharp reminder of how muchhas changed in the Austronesian linguistic scene over the last few decades.Even the perceived size of the family has doubled. The number of languageswas frequendy estimated at close to 500 (86,119,198). The most authoritativerecent surveys (132, 250) give figures of 1000-1200, making AN the world'slargest well-established language family, rivaled only by the less secure Niger-Congo grouping. Both are far ahead of the next largest established families,which are in the 150-200 range.

Why such dramatic growth in the perceived size of a family with a historyof study going back more than 200 years? Until recendy, several regions.

430 PAWLEY & ROSS

particularly in Melanesia and eastem Indonesia, remained poorly known tocomparative Austronesianists, who were few in number and who concentratedtheir attentions on a small selection of well-known languages. During thescores of regional surveys carried out over the last few decades (e.g. 17, 54,132, 177, 211, 219, 230, 231, 248, 251, 255, 263, 265, 266) hundreds oflanguages spoken by small communities have come to light. Some 460 lan-guages are spoken in Oceania (Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia). TheIndo-Malaysian region contains some 500 AN languages, the Philippinesabout 150, and Taiwan 17, while a handful of others are spoken in Vietnam,Thailand, and Madagascar. The ambitious two-part Language Atlas of thePacific Area (265, 266), though already out of date in some details, gives afairly accurate picture ofthe number and locations of languages.

THE GENETIC COMPARATIVE METHOD OELINGUISTICS

The genetic comparative method is the fundamental method of historical hn-guistics. Often simply called "the comparative method," it differs sharply fromthe typological comparative method. Typologists compare structural systems,seeking to determine universal principles of association between types ofcategories or subsystems. The statistical frequency of particular associationsmay form the basis of historical inferences about possible earlier systems anddirections of change. A crucial weakness of the typological method, as aninstrument of culture history, is that it treats types and frequencies but nothistorical particulars. The high frequency of a particular structural type in aparticular region or language family may be due not to its great antiquity but torecent diffusion or to the expansion of one subgroup of the population.

The genetic comparative method deals with historical particulars. Its coresubject matter is the body of morphemes (smallest meaningful elements) thatrelated languages have inherited from a common ancestor. The strengths of themethod stem from several peculiar characteristics of human language thatmake certain components of languages strikingly like species in their mannerof continuity and diversification. A meshing of these features defmes thenotion "genetic relationship" for languages.

A key peculiarity of language is that its morphemes are composed of unitsof sounds (phonemes) that by themselves have no meaning. Because a lan-guage has from a dozen to several dozen phonemes and most morphemescomprise several phonemes, there is a vast range of possible morphemicforms. Consequently, its morphemes (other than onomatopoeic elements) willshow a high degree of arbitrariness in their sound-meaning pairings. Thus,different languages are most unlikely to have more than a tiny percentage of(non-onomatopoeic) morphemes that resemble each other by chance. The fmal


peculiarity, crucial for the genetic method, is that sound change in the lexiconof any well-defined speech community is largely regular. Sometimes otherchanges, such as borrowings or the loss of old words, obscure the details ofsound changes, but ordinarily, the linguist can identify recurrent sound corre-spondences between related languages. Proof that morphemes in differentlanguages are cognate (related by direct inheritance from a common ancestor)rests not at all on superficial similarity in form but on whether the morphemesdisplay regular sound correspondences. These factors make it possible todistinguish genuine cognates from convergences and borrowings. The chancesare virtually nil for languages to independently develop such regularly corre-sponding roots as the following set: Tagalog hipag 'brother-in-law,' Malayipar 'related by marriage,' Sa'a (Solomon Is.) ihe 'brother-in-law,' Wayan (W.Fijian) iva 'son-in-law;' or the set Tagalog ba:go, Malay baharu, Sa'a haalu,Wayan vou, Tongan fo'ou, all meaning 'new.'

Commentators have occasionally suggested that although the principle ofsound change regularity is the key to unraveling the history of Indo-European,it will not hold for language families such as AN (111). In AN, as in Indo-European, intensive borrowing between dialects and neighboring languageshas sometimes created a tangle that is almost impossible to unravel (123,125),but the principle has proved highly effective in making sense of the history ofAN languages. In fact, in no group of languages is the regularity principlebetter exemplified than in the isolated languages of the Polynesian Triangle(21).

The linguist uses recurrent sound correspondences, together with a logicthat specifies the conditions under which phonological distinctions must beattributed to the parent language in order to construct a theory of the soundsystem of the proto-language. This yields a formal reconstruction of the proto-form for each cognate set. Reconstruction of the meaning attributable to aproto-form is straightforward if all witnesses agree. Otherwise the meaningmay be determined by a theory of semantic change together with subgroupingconsiderations (44,46,51,131).

Unlike the typological method of historical reconstruction, the genetic com-parative method classifies languages not on the basis of their shared similari-ties in structure but according to the distribution and weighting of sharedchanges to a reconstructed ancestral language. Armed with a theory of theproto-phonology and proto-lexicon, the linguist may be able to identify inno-vations peculiar to certain members of a family and thus arrive at a reasonablefamily tree. A mass of uniquely shared innovations or a smaller number ofunusual ones indicates a period of common development apart from otherlanguages. The most significant innovations are usually certain kinds of regu-lar sound changes, idiosyncratic sound changes in particular words, andchanges in the structure of morphological paradigms.

432 PAWLEY & ROSS

The genetic method has strict limitations. It is only secondarily concemedwith the comparison of noncognate bits of language. It is not equipped toinvestigate structural convergence due to bilingualism, genetic drift, or chance.The genetic method can, however, be allied usefully with other methods. Forexample, evidence about possible or favored kinds of structural change, takenfrom typology, may help linguists to choose between competing historicalinterpretations of comparative evidence.

AUSTRONESIAN SUBGROUPING AND DISPERSAL

Subgrouping (cladistics or family tree construction) plays a central role in thecomparative method, especially in lexical reconstruction and the chronologyof changes. Although the sound system of the ancestral language of a hetero-geneous family can, in principle, be reconstructed without reference to sub-grouping assumptions, this is not the case for the lexicon. Each phoneme oftheproto-language has a determinable outcome or reflex in every daughter lan-guage in those morphemes that are retained from the ancestral stock. (Even if aphoneme is lost, that loss is detectable as a zero reflex, i.e. nothing, in theposition where other languages have a positive reflex. For example. Way anand Tongan zero correspond to Tagalog g, Malay r, and Sa'a / in the compari-sons given earlier.) Unlike the phonemes, not every morpheme or word of theproto-language is continued in each daughter language. Inferences about theantiquity of a word shared by two members of a fannily (a cognate set) dependon how closely the two languages are thought to be related, i.e. about thestructure of the family tree.

Subgrouping also provides a relative chronology for changes in a speechtraditionwhether these are generated internally or borrowed from other tra-ditions. Finally, by indicating the geographic centers of genetic diversity, afamily tree may give strong clues about directions of language dispersal. Dyen(81) has developed a set of procedures for inferring the most probable disper-sal centers or "homelands" of language families or subgroups whose intemalrelationships are known, based on the principle of fewest moves.

At least five radically divergent hypotheses about the high order subgroupsof AN have been proposed. Until the 1930s views on AN high order subgroupswere ill-defined but most commentators (without providing any sound justifi-cation) spoke of four main branchesIndonesian, Melanesian, Micronesian,and Polynesian. The last three groups corresponded to the familiar geographicregions, and "Indonesian" (better labeled "Western AN") encompassed all thelanguages not in the other groups, including the languages of Formosa, thePhilippines, and Madagascar. However, as we shall see, the status of theMelanesian languages was particularly controversial.


The Oceanic HypothesisA radically different view was foreshadowed by Kern (157) and developed byDempwolff (73). Dempwolff argued that the Melanesian, Polynesian, and allbut a few Micronesian languages fall into a single subgroup (today called"Oceanic") apart from all Western AN languages. The Micronesian outsidersare Chamorro, Belauan, and possibly Yapese, all spoken on the western mar-gin of Micronesia. The Oceanic hypothesis, now accepted by virtually allAustronesianists, has powerful implications for Pacific culture history. If allAN languages of the southwest and Central Pacific derive from a singlelinguistic interstage exclusive of the rest of the family, the implication is thatthere was a single effective AN colonization of this area.

Dempwolff based his Oceanic group on the impressive number of sharedphonological innovations in roots retained from PAN. He first reconstructed aPAN sound system from comparisons of what he believed to be a repre-sentative sample of languages. The many changes uniting the Oceanic lan-guages in his sample included several mergers (where two or more PANphonemes became a single phoneme) such as the mergers of PAN *b and *p;of *c, *j, *s, and *z; of *e and *aw, and of *uy and */. Dempwolff did not saywhether he regarded Oceanic as a primary branch of AN or as a subgroup withcertain Western AN languages. But in a postscript (73a: 193-94) he proposedan explanation for the apparent biological differences between Polynesiansand Melanesians as well as for the greater diversity of the Melanesian lan-guages. Rephrased in modem terms: the AN speakers who entered the Pacific,and who came eventually to speak Proto Oceanic, were light-skinned, straight-haired people who had little resistance to malaria. Some Pacific islands werealready inhabited by dark, frizzy-haired people with stronger resistance tomalaria and other local diseases. Proto Oceanic speakers were in contact withsuch people, intermarried with them and were influenced by them linguisti-cally. Oceanic speakers then spread out over Melanesia and such contacts wererepeated. In places where malaria was rife, the malaria-resistant genes of thedarker, frizzy-haired people dominated. In places free of malaria, such asPolynesia, the original gene pool of the Oceanic-speaking colonists was betterpreserved.

The Oceanic hypothesis received further support from early postwar re-searchers (115-117, 182, 184) who drew the boundaries of the group moreprecisely and noted certain irregular lexical changes diagnostic of Oceanic. InMelanesia the boundary between Oceanic and non-Oceanic was placed justeast of Cenderawasih Bay at the western end of New Guinea (32, 120).Linguists have tinkered a good deal with Dempwolffs PAN and Proto Oce-anic sound systems and a number of refinements have been generally accepted(20, 32, 79, 80, 85, 166, 219, 220). These modifications have reduced the

434 PAWLEY & ROSS

number of shared sound changes defining Oceanic, but they still leave asizeable residue. Several grammatical innovations have been claimed to bediagnostic of Oceanic (197, 207) together with certain irregular changes in theform of words (117).

Challenges to the Oceanic HypothesisIn the 1960s the Oceanic hypothesis was challenged on lexicostatisticalgrounds. A study by Dyen (82, 84) showed that the AN languages of Melane-sia are exceptionally diverse in terms of percentages of cognates in a standardlist of some 200 basic vocabulary meanings. Over 30 of the 40 lexicostatisti-cally defmed first-order branches in Dyen's classification were confined toMelanesia, a finding that led one linguist and a few anthropologists (82, 186,244) to propose Melanesia as the most likely homeland of the Austronesians.This classification was dramatically at odds with innovation-based sub-groupings and has gained few supporters. Subsequent lexicostatistical studiesin AN have shown that different meanings in the standard 200-word list havewidely varying rates of replacement (92). They have shown that languagesvary a lot in their overall lexical replacement rates (37), thereby raising thequestion why some languages have been much more lexically conservativethan others.

The lexical diversity of the AN languages of Melanesia was earlier given aquite different explanation. Some scholars, chiefly Ray (210) and Capell (53),argued that the Melanesian languages are not Austronesian in the same senseas other members ofthe family. Instead, the languages of Melanesia were seenas hybrids, the products of contact between Indonesian (Westem AN) andPapuan (non-AN) languages that followed migrations of Westem AN speakersto various parts of Melanesia. The typical result of such contact in each regionwas a pidgin or mixed language with an AN superstrate and a Papuan sub-strate. The Papuan language was thought to differ radically for each localityand this was the main reason why the non-Austronesian content of Melanesianlanguages differed so greatly from region to region. A second part of theargument, spelled out in detail by Capell, denies that the Melanesian andPolynesian languages form a subgroup apart from Indonesian. The AN ele-ments in the Melanesian languages, he said, stem from multiple sources: anearly movement from Indonesia established AN languages in parts of Melane-sia, then people from the Philippines, central Sulawesi, and so on settled indifferent places. Capell specified groups of words that he believed stemmedfrom particular regions.

The Ray-Capell theory has been attractive to some anthropologists who seeit as a ready explanation for the perceived biological and cultural differencesbetween Melanesian and other AN speakers. For many years the theory wascited in anthropological surveys as if it were the standard or most probable


interpretation ofthe facts (190). However, there are some fundamental fiaws inthe linguistic argument. An objection to the first partthe hypothesis thatPapuan speakers in various parts of Melanesia adopted AN languages withsubstrate residueswas that in no case was the Papuan substrate languageidentified (119, 120); it remained a deus ex machina. Although Papuan-ANbilingualism in the New Guinea area is common and several recent studies(e.g. 76, 246) have shown that some AN languages have been greatly affectedby contact with neighboring Papuan languages, we are asked to believe thatlanguage shift happened again and again, that all the Melanesian languages arethe product of pre-AN communities adopting AN languages. Yet there areparts of Melanesia^Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fijithat probably had nopre-AN inhabitants. The other and quite crucial objection is that the secondpart of the Ray-Capell theorymultiple colonization by AN speakers fromdifferent parts of Island Southeast Asiadirectly counters the evidence for theOceanic hypothesis. In any case, statistical analysis (184) shows that there isno solid basis to Capell's correlations between particular words and particularregions.

The present consensus is that although AN-Papuan contacts have not con-tributed to the genetic diversity of AN languages, which the comparativemethod defines in terms of subgrouping relations, they have contributed muchto the structural and lexical diversity of languages in the Melanesian area (171,219, 225, 246) and to the sheer number of discrete languages spoken by smallcommunities.

Recent Proposals about High Order Subgroups

During the 1960s and 1970s a more complex theory of AN high order sub-groups emerged from work on historical phonology and morphology. Thepoorly documented Formosan languages, completely left out of Dempwolff scomparisons, became key witnesses in the reconstmction of PAN. Severalchanges to Dempwolffs proposed PAN sound system have been made in thelight of Formosan testimony (71, 84, 87, 222). Dyen noted the possibility of aprimary split in AN between {a) some or all Formosan languages and {b) agroup containing all other AN languages (84,87) on the grounds of phonologi-cal mergers common to all the extra-Formosan languages. Dahl (71) arguedforcefully for such a primary split. Blust (30, 49) named the extra-Formosanbranch "Malayo-Polynesian" (MP) and gave a morphological argument sup-porting it. Although several scholars have expressed strong reservations (89,91,262), the hypothesis has gained increasing acceptance (140,212, 223, 243,270).

There are several variants of the Formosan/Malayo-Polynesian hypothesis(223). According to Blust (30, 49), Harvey (140), and Reid (212) the Formo-

436 PAWLEY & ROSS

PAN

Formosan

Central/Eastem MP

Lesser Sundas,Maluku, etc.

S. HalmaheraAV.New Guinea

Oceanic

Figure J Subgrouping of Austronesian languages after Blust.

san languages may comprise more than one first-order branch of AN, perhapsdividing into Atayalic (northern), Tsouic (central), and Paiwanic (southern)groups. Another point of debate (48, 212, 269) is whether the languages of thePhilippines form a subgroup within MP. Although most Philippine languagesseem at least superficially similar to each other, Reid (212) suggests that theyhave no significant innovations in common. Zorc (269) challenges Reid, argu-ing that Philippine languages share numerous lexical replacements and thatthese constitute innovations defining a Philippine subgroup. The problem inthe Philippines, as in many other compact regions, is to distinguish innova-tions from borrowings among related languages that have been in contact formillennia. A recent study of Tiruray (Mindanao) vocabulary (50) shows thatthis Philippine language has replaced neariy 30% of its basic vocabulary withloans from its neighbors.

Blust (30, 31, 37-39, 42, 49) has proposed a more detailed family tree(Figure 1). In this tree the Westem MP comprises chiefiy the languages of thePhilippines, Malaysia, westem Indonesia (including Sulawesi) as far east asmid-Sumbawa, and Madagascar and Central MP comprises approximately thelanguages of eastem Indonesia east of Sumbawa and Sulawesi excluding


Halmahera. Oceanic remains, but it has been demoted to something like afourth-order subgroup.

A caveat is in order conceming Figure 1. It is probably fair to say that ofBlust's proposed subgroups, MP and three of its daughtersEastem MP,South HalmaheraAVest New Guinea, and Oceanicare rather widely acceptedbecause each is based on a significant body of diagnostic innovations. WestemMP, Central MP, and Central/Eastem MP, on the other hand, are much moreproblematic. The difficulties in finding innovations encompassing the entireputative Central MP group very likely refiect the existence of an earlier exten-sive and longstanding dialect network in the eastem Indonesian region (133).What one finds is overlapping innovations, each covering part of the region.As a whole, Westem MP languages seem to inherit only the innovationsshared by all MP languages, i.e. those attributable to Proto MP (PMP). Thissuggests that there was no Proto Westem MP, but rather that PMP divergedinto a number of dialects, one of whose descendants became Proto Cen-tral/Eastem MP. The Westem MP languages are simply those MP languagesthat do not belong to the Central/Eastem group. In the same vein. Central MPlanguages may be just those Central/Eastem languages that are not membersof Eastem MP.

It has long been recognized that linguistic splits are often imperfecti.e.not sudden and complete, but entailing the gradual divergence of a chain oflocal dialects. A corollary is that subgroups are often imperfecti.e. theproduct of a split in a homogeneous proto-language. Many imperfect sub-groups are formed by the spread of innovations over parts of a chain ofdialects, over many centuries, before this chain finally breaks up into discretelanguages. AN comparativists have begun to give more attention to the meth-odological problems that ancient dialect chains present in subgrouping andreconstmction. The most incisive application ofthe methods of dialect geogra-phy to a single AN region is Geraghty's (101) study ofthe history ofthe Fijianlanguages but there have been other studies that examine dialect chains, con-temporary or past (2,67,70,91,168, 177, 189,205,209, 219,230,248). Ross(219) attempts to build into his classification of Westem Oceanic languages adistinction between perfect subgroups, which result from complete splits, andimperfect subgroups.

Some Rival HypothesesSome scholars have argued for a Formosan-Philippine subgroup, as op-

posed to the notion of a primary division between Formosan and the rest. TheFormosan-Philippine hypothesis (83, 90, 91, 93, 253) is based on what itsproponents see as an impressive number of exclusively shared cognate sets.They argue that some of these cognate sets must refiect lexical innovationscommon to the languages of Taiwan and the Philippines. Dyen (91) has

438 PAWLEY & ROSS

recently proposed a variant of this hypothesis whereby the Formosan-Philip-pine group is part of a chain that also includes western Indo-Malaysian lan-guages. He labels this chain "Indo-Formosan." In other words, he implies thatProto Indo-Formosan remained a dialect chain for many centuries, stretchingover the long string of islands from Formosa to westem Indo-Malaysia. Thequestion is whether a dialect chain could have been maintained over a chain ofislands as far flung as those of Taiwan, the Philippines, and westem Indo-Ma-laysia and if so, for how long.

A seductive feature of the Formosan-Philippine and Indo-Formosan hy-potheses is that the languages in the proposed groups show quite strong simi-larities to each other (93,261). But the case should not be overstated. Similari-ties in vocabulary are more obvious across Philippine languages and certainlanguages of southeastem Taiwan than across the rest of Taiwan. Stmcturalsimilarities, and in particular the elaborate system of verbal "focus" (wherebya range of semantic rolesactor, undergoer, location, instmment, or benefici-ary^may occur as the "topic" or subject of a clause, with the role of the topicmarked by a distinctive affix on the verb), occur across a range of Philippinelanguages and some Formosan and westem Indo-Malaysian languages (48,201, 223, 243,259,260).

As we have mentioned, the genetic comparative method subgroups lan-guages by identifying shared innovations attributable to a common ancestor.The Formosan-Philippine and Indo-Formosan groups are supported only byputative lexical replacements inferred on the basis of exclusively shared cog-nate sets, which tend to be shaky evidence, especially when not supported byinnovations of other kinds. For one thing, words are the most easily borrowedelements of a language and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish betweenshared inherited replacements, which are diagnostic of a subgroup, and bor-rowings, which are not. More serious is the difficulty of determining what hasreplaced what in a family with only two first-order subgroups. Taking cognatesets meaning 'leaf,' for example, Formosan languages have a cognate setrefiecting *wciSaw 'leaf (49) whereas MP languages show a distinct cognateset refiecting *daSun 'leaf.' Did PAN have both forms or only one? If onlyone, which? When we encounter a sound correspondence like /s/ in LanguageA versus /h/ in Language B, we can be reasonably certain that the sound intheir common proto-language was *s and that the direction of change wasfrom *s to /h/ (95). But given the present data, there is no analogous way ofdetermining whether *daSun replaced *waSaw, or vice versa, or whether bothwere present in PAN.

Of course, arguments of this sort are not resolved by a single piece ofevidence. The proponents of a Formosan-Philippines group appeal to the rela-tively large number of exclusively shared cognate sets supporting it. But we


have no means of knowing that these are not shared retentions from PANand/or borrowings, rather than innovations (51).

The Eastern Malayo-Polynesian Hypothesis and the IntemalClassification of OceanicA significant body of shared innovations indicates that the immediate relativesof Oceanic consist of a South Halmahera-West New Guinea (SHWNG) group,whose members are spoken in the southem half of Halmahera and aroundCenderawasih Bay, at the northwestem end of Irian Jaya, close to the Bird'sHead of New Guinea (31). The name "Eastem Malayo-Polynesian" is nowgenerally applied to the putative SHWNG/Oceanic group.

Except for the well-defined Polynesian group and the fairly well-markedNuclear Micronesian group it has been hard to identify subgroups of Oceanicthat cover a wide area. However, substantial evidence has recently beenbrought forward indicating several large high order subgroups in westemMelanesia (i.e. New Guinea and the westem Solomon Islands). Ross (219)argues for two such high order subgroups: a Westem Oceanic group, derivedfrom a dialect network, and an Admiralties group. He divides Westem Oce-anic into three large groups: the North New Guinea Cluster, consisting of allthe AN languages of the north coast and offshore islands of Papua NewGuinea from Aitape to the Huon Gulf together with the languages of thenorthem coast of New Britain west of the Willaumez Peninsula and much ofsouthem New Britain; the Papuan Tip Cluster, containing the Oceanic lan-guages of southeastem and central Papua; and a third very large group, calledMeso-Melanesian, encompassing the languages of northem New Britain eastof the Willaumez Pensinula, the Bali-Vitu group. New Ireland, and the westemSolomons. Each of the three larger groups appears to derive from an olddialect network. Evidence is insufficient to classify the languages of the St.Matthias group, to the north of New Ireland, but these may well constitute aseparate high order subgroup within Oceanic.

No very large subgroups have been clearly identified elsewhere in Melane-sia. The more important currently accepted groups include Southeast Solo-monic, centered in Guadalcanal, Malaita and San Cristobal (168, 196, 251);Central and Northern Vanuatu (67, 196); Southem Vanuatu (170, 172); andNew Caledonia-Loyalties (103, 142). A Nuclear Micronesian subgroup isgenerally recognized (17, 18, 154), comprising the languages of geographicMicronesia excluding Chamorro, Belau, and Yapese. Its center of geneticdiversity is in the east, in the region of Kiribati, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and theMarshalls (154).

Much effort has gone into fmding the immediate relatives of Polynesian.The consensus is that the Fijian languages and Rotuman are, by a smallmargin, its closest kin and the name "Central Pacific" is given to this putative

440 PAWLEY & ROSS

Proto Oceanic

Admiralties Southeast Nuclear Central/NorthSolomonic Micronesian Vanuatu

NewCaledonia-Loyalties

Westem Oceanic Central Pacific

North NewGuinea

Meso-Melanesian Fijian Polynesian

RotumanPapuan Tip

Figure 2 A partial subgrouping of Oceanic languages.

subgroup (101,102,115,118, 196,199). Geraghty (101) suggests that Polyne-sian and the eastem Fijian dialects were once a unity distinct from westemFijian. The first split in Polynesian appears to have been between a Tongicbranch comprising Tongan and Niuean, and a Nuclear Polynesian branchcomprising the 28 or so remaining Polynesian languages (21, 63, 64, 193,194).

A wider "Eastem Oceanic" subgroup, comprising at least Central Pacificplus Central and Northem Vanuatu and perhaps Southeast Solomonic has beenproposed (101, 174, 196) but the evidence for such a group is so far uncon-vincing. Figure 2 gives a summary of important Oceanic subgroups that havesome degree of general acceptance.

Dispersal Centers: TheAge-Area MethodOccam's Razor tells us that the most likely primary dispersal center for agenetic group of species or languages is the area of its current greatest geneticdiversity. The subgrouping outlined in Figure 1 places the most likely primarydispersal center for Austronesian in the region of Taiwan and the northemPhilippines, where the Formosan and Malayo-Polynesian groups are contigu-ous. The same subgrouping also implies (a) a Philippines dispersal center forthe Malayo-Polynesian branch with a subsequent fanning out across the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, {b) an eastem Indonesia dispersal center for Central &Eastem Austronesian, and (c) a dispersal center either in northem Halmaheraor Cenderawasih Bay in New Guinea for Eastem MP. Blust (32) favors Cen-


derawasih Bay because of the apparently greater genetic diversity of its lan-guages.

Taken together. Figures 1 and 2 imply a primary dispersal center for Oce-anic in westem Melanesia (specifically, the Bismarck Archipelago or thefacing northem cocist of New Guinea). The structure ofthe Oceanic family treehas been interpreted by some (200, 205) as indicating a rapid dispersal ofOceanic-speaking peoples from northwestern Melanesia across southemMelanesia and into the Central Pacific following the breakup of Proto Oceanic.This interpretation is based on the observation that there is no well-definedcenter of genetic diversity within Oceanic itself. If there had been an initialbreak of Oceanic into several languages in northwestem Melanesia, followedmuch later by movements into southem Melanesia (the southeast Solomons,Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji), Polynesia, and Micronesia, one wouldexpect to find the languages of the later-settled regions subgrouping with oneor another of the major northwest Melanesian groups, but this is not the case.

LEXICAL RECONSTRUCTION AND CULTURE HISTORY

Lexical reconstmctions were first used over a century ago to elucidate earlyAN culture (156) but a much richer body of evidence has now accumulated.As Dempwolffs (73) phonological and lexical reconstmctions included noFormosan languages they are now generally attributed to PMP rather thanPAN. In a series of papers Blust (25-28, 33, 39, 43, 45) has increased thenumber of cognate sets requiring PMP or PAN lexical reconstructions to over4000. He is consolidating this material into a massive comparative dictionarythat will include reconstmctions for various stages from PAN down. At thePAN level, constraints of method and data continue to hamper reconstmctions.Only those cognate sets represented in both Formosan and Malayo-Polynesiancan be attributed to PAN etyma. The small number of Formosan languages andthe poor quality of most descriptions means that the number of Formosancognates with Malayo-Polynesian is modestperhaps little more than 1000.

A Proto Polynesian lexical file, begun in 1965 at the University of Auck-land as part of a broad Polynesian culture history project, has grown to over3000 reconstmctions (23). A Proto Micronesian file of some 1300 roots hasbeen assembled at the University of Hawaii. A Proto Oceanic lexicon andthesaums with perhaps 2000 lexemes is in preparation at the Australian Na-tional University.

A good deal of lexical work has been concemed chiefly with historicalphonology and has paid little attention to the fine grain of semantics. There isnow a move to examine closely the history of particular semantic fields,especially those of interest for culture history, and to specify reconstmctedmeanings more precisely. Recent studies have examined terms for horticulture

442 PAWLEY & ROSS

(99), wet rice cultivation (215), plant names (24, 249), canoe parts and sailing(206), buildings (44), cooking techniques (169), fish and/or fishing (105, 149,257), birds (65, 68), dog and pig (173), and aspects of early AN social organi-zation (34, 35, 38, 40, 51, 131, 201, 167). Blust (39) reconstructs about 180terms for marine and land-based flora and fauna, and for climate and topogra-phy, showing the levels of his family tree (PAN, PMP, etc) at which they arereconstructible. Zorc (270) has taken about 1300 PAN and PMP reconstruc-tions as the basis of a sketch of early AN culture history. Chowning (61)surveys a wide range of cultural fields, noting cognate sets within Oceanic thatare candidates for Proto Oceanic status.

Dispersal Centers: The Evidence of Lexical ReconstructionsLexical reconstructions for environmental features sometimes provide evi-dence for or against centers and directions of dispersal. Cognate words forcertain plants and animals characteristic of the Indo-Pacific tropics and sub-tropics are found in regions as widely separated as Formosa and Polynesia.Such widespread terms do no more than indicate an AN homeland somewherein this vast region (29,40, 86,156, 270). However, Blust (38) does better withcognate sets for certain mammals restricted to one side of the Wallace Line,which separates the Asian from the Australian (including eastem Indonesian)faunal zones. Cognate names for the scaly anteater (reflecting a proto-form*qaRem), a monkey taxon (HUCUT)), and ruminants (probably deer)[*(qa)Nuarf 'ruminant taxon,' *salajer) 'male, of ruminants,' and *(q)uReT)'horn'] are found in languages of Formosa, in certain parts of westem Indo-Malaysia, and (except for the scaly anteater) the Philippines. If one accepts thehypothesis of a primary division between Formosan and Malayo-Polynesian,one must attribute all of these etyma to PAN. The inference can then be drawnthat PAN was spoken west of the Wallace Line.

Blust (40) also points out that PAN had many etyma associated with the seaand a system of orientation distinguishing between *daya 'landward,' and*lahud 'seaward,' characteristic of people who live on the coast or on islands.Other words were *baRiuS 'typhoon' and *qamiS(-an) 'north' or 'cold sea-son.' The last two etyma taken together indicate a homeland north of theequator and perhaps on the margin of the tropical zone, for which southemTaiwan or the northem Philippines are reasonable candidates.

Technology and the Austronesian DispersalSeveral commentators (10, 12, 126, 127, 205, 232) have argued that horticul-ture was another key element in the Austronesian diaspora. Possession of avariety of crops may have enabled ANs to replace or marginalize non-farmingpopulations in Island Southeast Asia and to survive on small islands withimpoverished biota in the Central Pacific (126, 129). Blust (29) attributes to


PAN a cluster of terms for rice and millet: *pajay 'rice plant, paddy,' *beRas'husked rice,' *Semay 'cooked rice,' *ZaRami 'rice straw,' and *zawa 'millet'(all reflected both in Formosan and Indonesian witnesses), as well as *qumah'garden, cultivated field' (reflected also in Oceanic). Rice is present in earlyNeolithic sites in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo (15). However, riceagriculture goes back at least 6000 years in mainland Southeast Asia (15), withwet field (paddy) rice probably preceding dry field (swidden) rice, and itwould be surprising if PAN speakers lacked terms for wet rice technology. Itmay be significant that northem Luzon languages continue PAN *pajay and*Semay by terms that mean 'paddy rice' and 'swidden rice,' respectively(215). A group of terms for root crops are attributable to PMP but not to PAN:*tales 'taro: Colocasia sp.', *qubi 'yam: Dioscorea sp.,' and *biRaq 'giantarum: Ahcasia sp.' All the root crop terms persist in Oceanic, but none ofthose for grain crops do, indicating that rice and millet were not part of theProto Oceanic economy. Names for sago (PMP *Rambia), bananas (PMP*pu(n)ti), sugar cane (PAN *tebuS), and a range of tree and ground fruits canalso be attributed to PMP or PAN.

Over 20 boat and sailing terms can be reconstructed for PMP (206). Theseinclude terms for several outrigger parts, hull planking, and sail, indicating thatthese were part of PMP technology as one would expect from the comparativeethnographic evidence (134). None of the terms for outrigger parts have cog-nates in mainland Formosan languages. Linguistics cannot tell us whetherFormosan peoples lost the outrigger technology or whether they never had it.

Austronesian Social OrganizationLinguistic evidence has been at the center of an ongoing debate about thenature of kinship groups and marriage systems in early AN society. Using acomparative typological method, relating a variety of social factsrules ofresidence, marriage and descent, kinship terms, etcMurdock (185, 187)concludes that early Austronesians had bilateral kindreds and a Hawaiian-typekinship terminology rather than descent groups and distinct terms for mother'sand father's siblings. Goodenough (112), an isolated partial dissenter from thisview, argues for land-holding descent groups, which by definition could nothave been ego-centered kindreds. He notes a cognate set indicating *kainaya'land-holding descent group,' attributable to the common ancestor of Polyne-sian and Nuclear Micronesian languages.

Blust (34) argues that careful attention to linguistic evidence suggests aradically different set of conclusions from those reached by Murdock. Draw-ing on lexical agreements between Oceanic and Philippine-lndo-Malaysianlanguages he reconstructs a system of terms that are attributable to PMP andsometimes to PAN. Unless otherwise indicated, the following are all attribut-able to PMP: *Rumaq 'house, lineage,' *datu 'lineage or clan priest or offi-

444 PAWLEY & ROSS

cial' (with compound terms meaning 'male *datu' and 'female *datu' or'*datu ofthe upper vs lower half), *suku 'quarter, limb; section in a quadri-partite society,' *na Se(m)pat na baiay 'four houses; four parts of a society,'*Sua(n)ji 'blood kinsman,' *ma(n)tuqa 'MBAVF,' *dawa 'ZS/DH,' *[aya'FZS/ZH (ms),' and PAN *aya 'FZ.' Drawing on Murdock's work Blust notes(34:220) that the PMP system of kin terms "shows a negative statististicalcorrelation with exclusive organization around the bilateral kindred, and henceimplies the coetaneous presence of descent groups." He concludes that, takentogether, the linguistic material and the theory of social types require theinferences that PMP society 1. had descent groups that were subsequently lostin a broad culture area extending over the Philippines and westem Indo-Ma-laysia, 2. practiced preferential marriage to a classificatory mother's brother'sdaughter, 3. proscribed marriage to father's sister's daughters, 4. ordered line-ages into a dual division, with its associated universal cosmological scheme,and 5. recognized a four-part division of "houses," representing descent orresidential groups. He also suggests that there is a strong case for inferringasymmetrical exchange of wives between marriage classes.

Blust regarded his study as an illustration of the greater reliability of thegenetic comparative method vs comparative typology for reconstructing his-torical particularities. His paper provoked a lively response from a number ofcommentators (e.g. 1, 59, 96-98), who suggested that some of his inferenceswere too strong for the evidence. Sticking to his guns, Blust has developed theargument in subsequent papers (34,36,51). The debate has centered on (a) theprecise meaning and antiquity of certain terms and (b) whether specific kindsof terminologies imply specific norms of social behavior.

Sahlins' influential paper (229) on political types in Oceania is more con-cemed with structural principles governing the evolution of polities than withthe history of particular Oceanic societies. However, his broad equation ofPolynesia with hereditary chieftainships and of Melanesia with big-man lead-ership threatened for a time to be taken as implying distinct historical originsfor Polynesian and Melanesian societies. But critics have pointed out thatmany Austronesian-speaking societies of Melanesia have hereditary chiefs(58, 75). Pawley (201) attributes to Proto Oceanic a pair of terms *qa-lapas'chief, person of chiefly rank' and *qa-riki 'first bom son of chief,' indicatingthat a system of hereditary rank was found in the society whose language wasancestral to all AN languages of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Nuclear Microne-sia. Drawing on Malaita cognates, Lichtenberk (167) modifies the forms to*ta-la(m)pat and *qa ariki for which he offers the more cautious glosses'leader' and 'oldest child.' It has been argued (143) that a measure of socialstratification was necessary to organize colonizing voyages of the scale associ-ated with the settiement of the Central Pacific. Kirch (158) and Green (131)have used archaeological evidence to assert that what they term Ancestral


Polynesian Society was built in part on an inherited framework of status andrank.

Rapid Dispersal, Mobility, and Linguistic DivergenceThe initial AN expansion in Oceania was the work of sailing people whoappear to have moved quickly. For at least the first few centuries after theLapita expansion, some degree of contact was often maintained between set-tlements along island chains extending up to 600 km (126).

If the initial AN dispersal across Island Southeast Asia followed a similarpattern, how might this have shaped the pattem of linguistic divergence? Thebest contemporary analogs to the pattem of early AN differentiation withinlarge islands and compact island groups in Southeast Asia may well be foundin certain regions settled quite late by AN speakers. Madagascar (about thesize of Sumatra and larger in land area than the Philippines) and the HawaiianIslands (much smaller but scattered) were both probably settled about AD 600,and New Zealand (about the size of the Philippines) about AD 1000-1200(242). Madagascar contains a network of dialects, but only at the margins ismutual intelligibility low, with less than 60% of cognates on the SwadeshlOO-word list (88, 256). Hawaiian speech shows little regional variation. TheMaori dialects of the North Island of New Zealand are lexically quite diversebut all dialects have a high degree of mutual intelligibility (22).

These cases indicate that AN colonizers were generally mobile enough tomaintain fairly cohesive dialect networks over large islands and island groupsfor up to 1000 years or so. Work on the Fijian and westem Polynesian archi-pelagos (72, 101, 104, 151, 209, 230) and the disti-ibution of languages inPolynesia (200) reinforce this view. However, to draw any more precise impli-cations from the Madagascar and New Zealand cases for the early history ofAN we need careful studies of the dialect geography of these two regions.

CORRELATING ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND LINGUISTICEVENTS

A set of principles has been proposed for connecting archaeological and lin-guistic traditions in the Central Pacific or Remote Oceanic region (161, 204).Geographic isolation of the major islands groups and the fact that colonizationdid not begin until about 3000 years ago has favored continuity with gradualchange of the founding archaeological and speech traditions. There is virtuallyno doubt that the first humans to enter the Fiji-westem Polynesia region, andlater eastem Polynesia, spoke languages ancestral to the present day languagesof the Central Pacific subgroup.

Between 3600 and 3000 BP variants of the Lapita cultural complex appearacross a wide belt ofthe South Pacific (4, 127, 130, 153, 158, 159, 162, 235,

446 PAWLEY & ROSS

237, 239, 240). The principal markers of Lapita sites are elaborate and highlydistinctive dentate-stamped pottery motifs and a variety of vessel shapes, butthese markers are usually associated with other features (127, 130, 159, 162,240) including large coastal settiements, very often situated on small islandsand always handy to beaches that would provide good launching sites forboats; a tool kit containing characteristically shaped stone and shell adzes andscrapers; obsidian and chert flake tools, often imported from remote sources;one-piece shell trolling hooks; pearlshell knives and scrapers; various kinds ofconus shell disks and pendants; earth ovens; and middens full of bones fromlagoon fish and turtle and containing chicken and pig bones. The earliestLapita sites, dating to about 3600 BP, are in the Bismarck Archipelago. Therethe complex geometric dentate stamped decorative style appears full blown, ina variant called Early Westem Lapita. By 3200 BP a slightly modified form ofLapita was present in Santa Cmz, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia, where it wasevidently the founding culture. By about 3000 BP another variant, EastemLapita, appears in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, and this is clearly ancestral to laterFijian and Polynesian material cultures (127-129,161).

This swift spread of Lapita culture across Island Melanesia and into west-em Polynesia, following a perhaps 400 year period of earlier development inthe Bismarck Archipelago, is consistent with the pattem of Oceanic sub-grouping we outlined previously. The subgrouping indicates a period of Oce-anic unity, most likely in westem Melanesia, where Oceanic has its immediateextemal relatives, followed by the breakup of Proto Oceanic into a number ofwidely dispersed subgroups that are either coordinate or close to coordinate.

A long period of common development apart from the rest of Oceanic,perhaps on the order of a thousand years, is indicated by the phonological,grammatical, and lexical innovations of the Polynesian group. The archae-ological record shows a correspondingly long pause between the Lapita hori-zon in westem Polynesia and the settlement of eastem Polynesia, which ap-pears not to have begun until early in the first millennium AD (10, 128, 161,204, 242). Irwin (152,153), however, questions whether the pause is real or anartifact of archaeological sampling and visibility.

The equation of Lapita with intmsive AN languages is less straightforwardin the Bismarck Archipelago, where human settlement goes back more than30,000 years (3), than it is in the Central Pacific. Countering this equation,proponents of a predominantly westem Melanesian origin of Lapita (4, 114,258) point out that no completely satisfactory ancestral tradition for Lapita hasbeen found either in Southeast Asia or in Melanesia. They argue that some ofthe elements of the Lapita complex, including horticulture, lagoon fishing,inter-island trading of obsidian, and earth ovens predate Lapita in westemMelanesia. A radical suggestion has been made (245) that in westem Melane-


sia, Lapita may be no more than a kind of pottery, widely traded and superim-posed on diverse local cultures.

This last suggestion, though perhaps made tongue-in-cheek, raises severalquestions: How well are archaeologists able to distinguish between inheritedand intrusive elements in an archaeological tradition? Under what conditions,if any, does it make sense to speak of genetic relatedness or continuity betweenarchaeological assemblages, i.e. implying the transmission of a coherent(though not unchanging) tradition from generation to generation within asociety? The term "culture" is notoriously vague. What assurance do we havethat the archaeologist's "culture" has the same kind of coherence and transmis-sibility that a language has? Kirch & Green (161) attempt to answer thesequestions in the Polynesian context.

Those who think the major elements of Lapita culture originated in South-east Asia (7, 8, 16, 238, 240) argue that Lapita is not just pots but a coherenttradition with clear antecedents in Island Southeast Asia. In westem Melanesiaand further east, Lapita sites form a well-defined cultural horizon. Theseresearchers assert that the continuities with pre-Lapita technology in the Bis-marck Archipelago have been exaggerated.

Even if Southeast Asian antecedents are found for Lapita technology, canwe be sure that the technology was spread by the migration of a society ofpeople rather than by the diffusion of useful elements through trade, etc? Herethe archaeological evidence is suggestive but at present not decisive. Propo-nents ofthe migration view appeal to linguistic evidence as the clincher: wholelanguages do not spread by diffusion. The subgrouping evidence stronglyindicates that Oceanic speakers entered Melanesia from the west, and the massof cognate sets for many facets of social and economic life among contempo-rary AN languages from all regions supports the argument for migration. Theancestors of the Proto Oceanic speech community may not have brought alltheir culture with them but they brought a large part of it. There is an impres-sive persistence of vocabulary for various cultural domains in some contempo-rary Oceanic languages of Melanesia, in most of the Nuclear Micronesianlanguages, and in all of the Polynesian languages (see references in the pre-vious section on lexical reconstmction). But cognate sets generally do notindicate the size and layout of settlements or the fine details of technologymotifs, adze forms, etcby which archaeologists often unite or distinguishtraditions.

For much of Island Southeast Asia the archaeological record for the neo-lithic is sparse. The earliest pottery-bearing sites in the Philippines and Indone-sia date to around 5000 BP (236). The earliest sites in Island Southeast Asia,dating just prior to 5000 BP, are found in Taiwan where they are associatedwith the Dapenkeng culture (57, 160, 236). A number of archaeologists favorTaiwan as the AN dispersal center on the grounds that the pottery and material

448 PAWLEY & ROSS

culture tradition is probably derived from cultures that existed in South Chinaat a slightly earlier date (8, 9, 57, 160, 252). Not all archaeologists, however,support a Taiwanese dispersal center (178,234).

QUESTIONS OF CONTINUITY AND CHANGEWe tum fmally to questions of continuity and change: Why have some ANlanguages been extremely conservative and others extremely innovative? Whyhave AN languages virtually taken over Island Southeast Asia, with the partialexception of the eastem islands of Indonesia, while in westem Melanesia theyshow a much more restricted distribution? And does continuity of languagenecessarily imply continuity of community?

Language change is most easily quantified in the domain of basic vocabu-lary. Blust (37) shows that Malayo-Polynesian languages vary enormously intheir retention of forms for meanings on a 200-item basic vocabulary list. (Hisstudy does not include Formosan languages.) Stmctural change is harder toquantify, but there is no doubt that some languages have been more conserva-tive than others in phonology (47, 71, 73) and morphology (195, 196, 219,221).

Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and the larger islands in the BismarckArchipelago and the Solomons have been occupied by Homo sapiens for atleast 40,000 years (3, 4, 9). As AN speakers colonized Island Southeast Asiaand westem Melanesia they undoubtedly encountered established populations.These populations are perhaps best represented today by the Negrito groupsscattered through the Philippines, the Malaysia/Thailand border area, and theAndaman Islands, and by the Papuan-speaking peoples of eastem Indonesiaand westem Melanesia (8). No indigenous non-AN languages survive today inTaiwan, the Philippines, or westem Indo-Malaysia. By contrast, in eastemIndonesia and westem Melanesia numerous non-AN languages (convention-ally referred to as "Papuan") continue to be spoken along probable AN migra-tion routes.

There seems to be a rough correlation between the degree to which ANlanguages have replaced previous languages in a region and their degree oflexical and structural conservatism. Lexically, the most conservative Malayo-Polynesian languages are concentrated in the Philippines and the westem partof the Indo-Malaysian archipelago (centered in Malaysia, Sumatra, Kaliman-tan, and Sulawesi). The most innovative languages are concentrated in eastemIndonesia (Halmahera and Irian Jaya) and Melanesia. In terms of grammaticalstmcture, the most conservative languages are concentrated in Formosa, thePhilippines, Madagascar, and to a lesser extent, in the westem part of theIndo-Malaysian archipelago. Within Oceanic one can also distinguish betweenconservative and innovative languages (121, 125). The most conservative


languages, lexically and grammatically, are concentrated in Fiji, westem Poly-nesia, the westem Carolines, the southeast Solomons, northem Vanuatu, thenorthem coast of New Britain, and the nearby Bali-Vitu islands. Within Mela-nesia, the more innovative languages are found mainly on the northem coast ofthe New Guinea mainland and in the Markham Valley and Huon Gulf hinter-lands, in southem New Britain, southem Vanuatu, and New Caledonia.

If there is a single dynamic behind these two sets of facts, what might it be?It probably has to do with the nature of the populations encountered byimmigrant AN speakers. From linguistic and ethnographic evidence, Reid(213,214) reconstmcts a scenario for early Negrito/AN contact in Luzon in thenorthem Philippines. He concludes that the Luzon Negritos were hunter-gath-erers, relatively few in number, and readily dominated by the AN agricultural-ists. He infers that they shifted at an early date to AN languages, since the ANlanguages spoken by the Negritos today, although ultimately subgrouped withother Luzon languages, are not closely related to any of them. Some Negritosretained much of their distinctive way of life after the language shift. In othercases they were absorbed into non-Negrito AN-speaking communities. Onecan assume that what happened in the northem Philippines was repeated inwestem Indo-Malaysia, although in this case all non-AN speakers ultimatelyeither shifted to AN languages or died out. Either way, the pre-AN populationlacked the demographic and economic muscle to have much impact on ANlanguages in this region.

The situation in New Guinea was quite different. Evidence indicates thatpre-AN populations in New Guinea were in many cases horticulturalists, culti-vating a number of root and tree crops (109, 110, 268). They were probablymore numerous and sedentary and therefore much less readily dominated byimmigrants than hunter-gatherers would have been. There were probably sub-stantial populations in the hinterlands of the northem coast of New Guinea andon all the large islands of westem Melanesia when AN speakers arrived (4).There is little evidence for pre-AN horticulture in the Bismarck Archipelagobut the proximity to New Guinea suggests that horticulture may have beenthere. AN immigrants, who traditionally exploited coastal resources, wouldnot have competed strongly for territory far from the coast; indeed, the Lapitapeople seem to have largely skirted the New Guinea mainland, keeping tooffshore islands.

The distribution of early Lapita sites in westem Melanesia and the dates fortheir eastward spread suggests that some of the Lapita people of westemMelanesia were for a few centuries able to keep their distance from the non-AN peoples inhabiting the main islands. Before long one or more groups ofthese Lapita island dwellers moved east. Their descendants who reached Fiji,Polynesia, and Micronesia had the whole field to themselves and retained ituntil European contact. It appears that they also found Vanuatu and New

450 PAWLEY & ROSS

Caledonia uninhabited, although a degree of doubt remains in these cases(131).

This separation between immigrants and indigenes in westem Melanesiawas not maintained for long. AN languages remain dominant in Island Mela-nesia, but on the New Guinea mainland there is evidence that communitieshave occasionally shifted from an AN to a neighboring Papuan language.Dutton (76,77) documents an area of southeastern Papua where such shifts arein progress. In AN languages spoken on and close to the New Guinea main-land, contacts between AN and Papuan speakers have at times led to profoundstructural changes and to heavy lexical borrowing (53,55,171,218,246,247).There are numerous AN languages and groups on or near mainland PapuaNew Guinea that show features attributable to Papuan contact: verb-final wordorder (replacing Proto Oceanic verb-medial or verb-initial word order), pre-posed possessors, postpositions, and loss of Proto Oceanic derivational mor-phology. Only in the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomons, where there isno firm evidence for agriculture in pre-Lapita times and where communitieswere therefore probably smaller than on the New Guinea mainland, might weregularly expect to find shifts from a Papuan to an AN language or AN-in-duced structural change. Madak on New Ireland is an AN language whosespeakers appear to have once been Papuan speakers (224). Papuan languageshave partly held their ground in New Britain and Bougainville. In other partsof westem Melanesia, Papuan languages have been almost completely re-placed by AN languages. In general, we do not know how the replacementswere effected.

The precondition for contact-induced structural change is widespread biUn-gualism. When a substantial number of speakers are bilingual in the languagethat is emblematic of their own ethnicity and in the language of neighbors withwhom they have frequent contact, the linguistic effects of this contact are oftenfar more radical than those of a culturally dominant language (that is oftenspoken by only a small minority of the dominated). The less extreme outcomeof such bilingualism is contact-induced change in the emblematic languagetoward the norms of the neighbor language. The more extreme outcome, asnoted above, is language shift: the emblematic language is relinquished infavor of the neighbor language.

After bilingualism is established as a social norm, bilingual speakers seemto construct meanings in increasingly similar ways in both their languages.This convergence probably has both a cognitive and a social foundation. Onone hand, bilinguals tend to integrate the different conceptual resources of-fered by their two languages into a single intellectual system. On the otherhand, when foreigners talk to each other, they adapt to each other's usages,choosing common ground and chopping off the noncongruent edges. Bilin-gualism in premodem societies has received little scholarly attention, despite


an upsurge of interest in it in metropolitan settings. Exceptions are Grace'sbooks (121, 124), which are based on the author's experience as a field linguistin the Pacific.

Contact-induced changes form a progression that begins with the adoptionof discourse-level markers (for example, aria 'O.K.,' 'Let's go,' in both ANand Papuan languages of the Madang area) and a tendency for "the way thingsare worded" (124) in the two languages to become increasingly similar. Thur-ston (246, 247) provides several complex examples of wording convergencesin both AN and Papuan languages in northwestern New Britain. Similarity ofwording then leads to increasing similarity in morphosyntactic structure. TheBel languages, a group of AN languages spoken around Madang on the north-em coast of Papua New Guinea, have adopted the clause structure of neighborPapuan languages (218, 226).

AN-Papuan contacts over several millennia in parts of Melanesia must haveproduced changes in many domains of culture, from economics and kinship tocosmology. Such changes often show linguisdc traces in the form of borrowedwords and formulae; yet there have been few systematic studies attempting toestablish directions of cultural borrowing or convergence from linguistic evi-dence.

There are two other varieties of contact that have changed AN languages.The first may be encompassed under the rubric "foreign domination," and thesecond entails contact and bilingualism in two (or more) AN languages. For-eign domination, which takes the form of political or cultural domination byspeakers of another language, u

.sually manifests itself in the shape of lexical borrowings, but if theseborrowings are sufficiently intense, changes in morphology and phonologyalso take place. A glance through the etymologies in the Comparative Aus-tronesian Dictionary (250) reveals the pervasive effects of Sanskrit and Arabicborrowings in westem Indo-Malaysian languages through first Indie, thenIslamic, cultural dominance, as well as considerable borrowing from the lan-guages of European colonizers. Intense Sanskrit borrowing has introduced acontrast between dental/alveolar /t, d/ and retroflex /2t, Idl intoMadurese, Javanese, and Balinese (212, 223). Cases of pervasive borrowingfrom a politically or culturally dominant language have also been documentedin a number of pre-contact societies in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia(20, 105, 139,148,191).

The most detailed study of AN contact-induced change is Pallesen's (192)examination of contact between Tausug, a Meso-Philippine language, andvarious Sama dialects (whose genetic affiliations lie somewhere in westemIndonesia) in the Sulu Archipelago. Most other studies of contact-inducedchange in AN languages concern Oceanic cases. Rotuman has been reshapedby extensive borrowing, at two different periods, from two Polynesian Ian-

452 PAWLEY & ROSS

guages (20). Labu, an AN language spoken at the mouth of the MarkhamRiver in Papua New Guinea, has been radically restructured on the model ofBukawa, a member of a different AN subgroup (148). West Uvean, a Polyne-sian language in the Loyalty Islands, has added several new consonant pho-nemes as a result of borrowing lexical items from its radically different ANneighbor, Iaai (191). The phonological complexity of a number of languagesin New Caledonia and the difficulty of applying the comparative method tothem has been attributed to massive contact-induced change among divergentAN languages (122, 123,125,141, 217).

CONCLUSION

The problem of culture history is that it is an interdisciplinary enterprise, butthe methods and data used by each of its major constituent disciplines are notreadily comparable. Nonetheless such comparisons are necessary in order toevaluate competing hypotheses within disciplines and to gain a more completepicture of the past than any single method can provide. The AN-speakingregion offers exceptionally favorable conditions for such interdisciplinary re-search. Until recently, most prominent hypotheses about the culture history ofthe AN-speaking regions originated in the data of comparative linguistics orcomparative ethnography, with scholars from these two disciplines generallyworking independently. Archaeology has been a vigorous latecomer. Earlyattempts at integrating linguistic and archaeological evidence concentrated oncenters and directions of AN dispersal, with archaeology providing a chrono-logical framework for linguistically-based scenarios. Currently, the focus ofculture historical syntheses is shifting toward comparisons of the lexicons ofreconstructed languages with the content and environmental contexts of vari-ous archaeological assemblages. There has been no serious attempt to squarethe recent findings of historical human biology with those of other disciplines,but there are signs that this too is under way (11,131,146).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Lois Carrington for carefully checking and editing the textand references; to Roger Green and Matthew Spriggs for providing detailedcomments on a draft; and to Robert Blust, Ross Clark, James Eox, PaulGeraghty, Jeff Marck, Matthew Pawley, and Lawrence Reid for many usefulcriticisms and suggestions.Literature Cited

1. Aberle DF. 1980. Comment. Curr. Anthro- its Morphology. Canberra: Pacific Linguis-pol. 21(2):226-30 tics, C-l 19. 253 pp.

2. AdcUaiKA. 1992. Proto-Malayic The Re- 3. Allen J, Gosden C, White JP. I989.Humanconstruction of its Phonology and Parts of Pleistocene adaptations in the tropical is-


land Pacific: recent evidence from NewIreland, a greater Australian outlier. Antiq-uity 63(240):548-60

4. Allen J, White P 1989. The Lapita home-land: some new data and an interpretation.y.Po/y/i. Soc. 98:129-46

5. Anson D. 1986. Lapita pottery of the Bis-marck Archipelago and its affinities. Ar-chaeoi. Oceania 21:157-65

6. Baldi P, ed. 1990. Linguistic Change andReconstruction Methodology. Berlin/NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter. 752 pp.

7. BellwoodPS. \97S. Man's Conquest of thePacific: The Prehistory of Southeast Asiaand Oceania. Auckland: Collins. 462 pp.

8. Bellwood PS. 1984. A hypothesis for Aus-tronesian origins. Asian Perspect. 26:107-17

9. BellwoodPS. ]9S5. Prehistory ofthe Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Sydney: Aca-demic. 370 pp.

10. Bellwood PS. 1987. The Polynesians: Pre-history of an Island People. London:Thames & Hudson. 175 pp.

11. BellwoodPS. 1989. The colonization ofthePacific: some current hypotheses. See Ref.146, pp. 11-59

12. BellwoodPS. 1991. The Austronesian dis-persal and the origin of languages. Sci. Am.265:88-93

13. Bellwood PS, ed. 1991. Indo-Pacific Pre-history 1990. Proc. 14th Congr. Indo-Pa-cific Prehist. Assoc. Canberra/Jakarta:Indo-Pacific Prehist. Assoc.

14. Deleted in proof15. Bellwood PS, Gillespie R, Thompson GB,

Vogel JS, Ardika IW, Datan I. 1992. Newdates for prehistoric Asian rice. Asian Per-spect. 3\(2):\6\-10

16. Bellwood PS, Koon P 1989. 'Lapita colo-nists leave boats unburned!' The questionof Lapita links with Island Southeast Asia.A 6 3 2 O 6^ O )

17. Bender BW. 1971. Micronesian languages.SeeRef. 231, pp. 426-65

18. Bender BW, Wang J. 1985. The status ofProto-Micronesian. See Ref. 203, pp. 53-92

19. Deleted in proof20. Biggs BG. 1965. Direct and indirect inheri-

tance in Rotuman. Lingua 14:383-41521. Biggs BG. 1978. The history of Polynesian

phonology. See Ref. 264, pp. 691-71622. Biggs BG. 1989. Towards the study of

Maori dialects. See Ref. 138, pp. 61-7623. Biggs BG. 1990. Proto-Polynesian lexical

file. Printout. Auckland: Univ. Auckland,Dept. Anthropol.

24. Biggs BG. 1993. New words for a newworld. See Ref. 208. In press

25. Blust RA. 1969. Some new Proto-Aus-tronesian trisyllables. Ocean. Linguist.8:105-84

26. Blust RA. 1970. Proto-Austronesian ad-denda. Ocean. Linguist. 9(2): 104-62

27. Blust RA. 1972. Proto-Oceanic addendawith cognates in non-Ocean Austronesianlanguages: a preliminary list. Work Pap.Linguist. 4(l):l-43

28. Blust RA. 1976. Additions to Proto-Aus-tronesian addenda. Work. Pap. Linguist.5(3):33-61

29. Blust RA. 1976. Austronesian culture his-tory: some linguistic inferences and theirrelations to the archaeological record.World Archaeoi. 8(l):19-43

30. Blust RA. 1977. The Proto-Austronesianpronouns and Austronesian subgrouping: apreliminary report. Work. Pap. Linguist.9(2):1-15

31. Blust RA. 1978. Eastem Malayo-Polyne-sian: a subgrouping argument. See Ref.264, pp. 181-234

32. Blust RA. 1978. The Proto OceanicPalatals. Auckland: Polyn. Soc, Monogr.43

33. Blust RA. 1980. Austronesian etymologies.Ocean. Linguist. 19:1-181

34. Blust RA. 1980. Early Austronesian socialorganization: the evidence of language.Curr. Anthropol. 21(2):205-47

35. Blust RA. 1980. Notes on Proto-Malayo-Polynesian phratry dualism. Bijdr. Taat-Land- Volkenkd. 136:215-47

36. BlustRA. 1981. Dual divisions in Oceania:innovation or retention? Oceania 52(1):66-80

37. Blust RA. 1981. Variation in retention rateamong Austronesian languages. Presentedat 3rd Int. Conf. Austronesian Linguistics,Bali, Indonesia

38. BlustRA. 1982. The linguistic value oftheWallace Line. Bijdr. Taal- Land- Volkenkd.138(2-3):231-50

39. Blust RA. 1984. Austronesian etymolo-gies-II. Ocean. Linguist. 22-23:29-149

40. Blust RA. 1984. The Austronesian home-land: a linguistic perspective. Asian Per-spect. 26:45-67

41. Blust RA. 1984. Comment. See Ref. 177,pp. 626-28

42. Blust RA. 1984. More on the position of thelanguages of eastem Indonesia. Ocean.Linguist. 22-23:\-2&

43. Blust RA. 1986. Austronesian etymolo-gies-III. Ocean. Linguist. 25:1-123

44. BlustRA. 1987.Lexicalreconstmctionandsemantic reconstruction: the case of'house' words. Diachronica 4(l-2):79-106

45. Blust RA. 1989. Austronesian etymolo-giesIV. Ocean. Ljnguist. 28:1-180

46. Blust RA. 1990. Linguistic change and re-construction methodology in the Austrone-sian language family. See Ref. 6, pp. 133-

454 PAWLEY & ROSS

47. Blust RA. 1991. Sound change and migra-tion distance. See Ref. 52, pp. 27-42

48. Blust RA. 1992. The Greater Central Phil-ippines hypothesis. Ocean. Linguist.30:73-129

49. BlustRA. 1992. The position ofthe Formo-san languages: method and theory in Aus-tronesian comparative linguistics. See Ref.165, pp. 21-55

50. Blust RA. 1992. On speech strata inTiruray. In Papers in A ustronesian Linguis-tics, No. 2, ed. MD Ross, pp. 1-52. Can-berra: Pacific Linguistics, A-82

51. BlustRA. 1993. Austronesian sibling termsand culttire history. See Ref. 208. In press

52. Blust RA, ed. 1991. Currents in PacificLinguistics: Papers on Austronesian Lan-guages and Ethnolinguistics in Honour ofGeorge W. Grace. Canberra: Pacific Lin-guistics, C-l 17. 560 pp.

53. Capell A. 1943. The Linguistic Position ofSouth-Eastem Papua. Sydney: Aus-tralasian Medical

54. Capell A. \962. A Linguistic Survey of theSouth-Western Pacific. Noumea: S. PacificCommission

55. Capell A. 1976. General picture of Aus-tronesian languages. New Guinea area. SeeRef. 263, pp. 5-52

56. Carrington L. 1990. Select Austronesianbibliography. See Ref. 250. In press

57. Chang KC. 1992. Taiwan Strait archaeol-ogy and the Protoaustronesians. See Ref.165, pp. 56-81

58. ChowningA. 1979. Leadership in Oceania./ Pac. Hist. 14:66-84

59. Chowning A. 1980. Comment. Curr. An-thropol. 21(2):231-33

60. Chowning A. 1984. Comment. Curr. An-thropol. 21(2):628

61. Chowning A. 1991. Proto Oceanic culture:the evidence from Melanesia. See Ref. 52,pp. 43-75

62. Clark R. 1975. Comment on Polynesiansibling terms. Am. Anthropol. 77:85-88

63. ClarkR. \976. Aspects of Proto-PolynesianSyntax. Auckland: Linguistic Soc. NZ 178 pp.

64. Clark R. 1979. Language. See Ref 155, pp.249-70

65. Clark R. 1982. Proto-Polynesian birds. SeeRef. 233, pp. 121^3

66. Clark R. 1984. Conmient. Curr. Anthropol.21(2):628-29

67. Clark R. 1985. Languages of north andcentral Vanuatu: groups, chains, clustersand waves. See Ref. 203, pp. 199-236

68. Clark R. 1993. Evolution, migration andextinction of Oceanic bird names. See Ref.208. In press

69. Clark JT, Terrell J. 1978. Archaeology inOceania. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 7:293-319

70. Collins JT. 1983. The Historical Relation-ships ofthe Languages of Central Maluku,

Indonesia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics,D-47. 168 pp.

71. Dahl OC. 1976. Proto-Austronesian. Oslo:Studentlitteratur. Revised ed. 1976

72. DavidsonJM. 1977.WestemPolynesiaandFiji: prehistoric contact, diffusion and dif-ferentiation in adjacent archipelagos.World Archaeoi. 9(l):82-94

73. Dempwolff O. 1934. Vergleichende Lautle-hre des austronesischen Wortschatzes.Band I: Induktiver Aufbau einer indonesis-chen Ursprache. Beiheften zur Zeitschriftfiir Eingeborenen-Sprachen 15. Berlin: Re-imer

73a. Dempwolff O. 1937. Vergleichende Laut-lehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes.Band 2: Deduktive Anwendung des Urin-donesischen auf austronesische Einzel-sprachen. Beiheften zur Zeitschrift fiirEingeborenen-Sprachen 17. Berlin: Re-imer

73b. Dempwolff O. 1938. Vergleichende Laut-lehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes.Band 3: Austronesisches Worterverzeich-nis. Beiheften zur Zeitschrift fiir Einge-borenen-Sprachen 19. Berlin: Reimer

74. Diebold AR Jr. 1987. Linguistic ways toprehistory. In Proto-Indo-European: TheArchaeology of a Linguistic Problem: Stud-ies in Honor of Marija Gimbutas, ed. SNSkomal, EC Polome, pp. 19-71. Washing-ton, DC: Inst. Study Man

75. Douglas B. 1979. Rank, power, authority:a reassessment of traditional leadership inSouth Pacific societies. /. Pac. Hist. 14:2-27

76. Dutton TE. 1976. Magori and similar lan-guages of south-east Papua. See Ref 263,pp.581-636

77. Dutton TE. 1982. Borrowing in Austrone-sian and non-Austronesian languages ofcoastal south-east mainland Papua NewGuinea. See Ref 135, pp. 109-77

78. Dutton TE, Tryon DT, eds. 1993./.anguageContact and Change in the AustronesianWorld. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. In press

79. Dyen I. 1951. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian"Z." Language 27:534-40

80. Dyen 1. 1953. The Proto-Malayo-Polyne-sian Laryngeals. Baltimore: Linguist. Soc.Am. 65 pp.

81. Dyen I. 1956. Language distribution andmigration theory. Language 32:611-26

82. Dyen I. 1962. Lexicostatistically deter-mined borrowing and taboo. Language37:38-46

83. Dyen I. 1963. The position of the Ma-layopolynesian languages of Formosa.Asian Perspect. 7(1-2):261-71

84. Dyen 1.1965. Formosan evidence for somenew Proto-Austronesian phonemes. Lin-gua 14:285-305

85. Dyen I. 1965. Alexicostatisticalclassifica-


tion of the Austronesian languages. Int. J.Am. Linguist. Memoir 19

86. Dyen I. 1971. The Austronesian languagesand Proto-Austronesian. See Ref. 231, pp.5-54

87. Dyen I. 1971. The Austronesian languagesof Formosa. See Ref. 231, pp. 168-99

88. Dyen I. 1971. Malagasy. SeeRef. 231, pp.211-39

89. Dyen I. 1982. The present status of someAustronesian subgrouping hypotheses. SeeRef. 136, pp. 31-35

90. Dyen I. 1990. Homomeric lexical classifi-cation. See Ref. 6, pp. 211-30

91. Dyen I. 1992. The internal and externalclassification of the Formosan languages.SeeRef. 165, pp. 162-96

92. Dyen I, James AT, Cole JWL. 1967. Lan-guage divergence and estimated word re-tention rate. Language4'i(\).\5Q-l\

93. Dyen I, Tsuchida S. 1991.Proto-Philippineas the closest relative of Proto-Formosan.SeeRef. 137, pp. 85-101

94. Epling PJ, Kirk R, Boy

austronesian culture and history

Documents

Transcript of austronesian culture and history