Proto-Oceanic and the Austronesian Languages of Western Melanesia

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to elucidate the higher-order genetic relationships of the Austronesian languages of western Melanesia within the framework of Dempwolff's 'Oceanic hypothesis". The west Melanesian Oceanic languages investigated here consist of all the Austronesian languages of Papua New Guinea and of the Solomon Islands as far east as Santa Ysabel. Chapter 1 deals with matters of presentation and then offers a model of language diversification and a methodology as a starting-point for the investigation. In chapter 2 it is suggested that the Proto Oceanic homeland was in the area of the Vitiaz Strait and northern New Britain, and a brief outline of the membership of \Vest Melanesian Oceanic is provided. Evidence from the Austronesian languages of western Melanesia is used in chapters 3 and 4 to refine the reconstruction of Proto Oceanic as a basis for recon structing the prehistory of its descendants in western Melanesia. In particular. the theory of oral-/nasal-grade 'crossover' is revised, and an explanation offered for Milke's proto phoneme n j. The Austronesian languages of western Melanesia are found to belong to four clusters of languages. In chapters 5 to 9, some of the more important internal relationships of the clusters are prese ted, but this presentation is li mited to features which help in elucidating the relationships between the four clusters. These clusters are the North New Guinea, Papuan Tip, Meso-Melanesian and Admiralties clusters. In chapter 10 it is shown that the first three of these are more closely related to each other in a grouping here named 'Western Oceanic' than they are to the fourth cluster, the languages of the Admiralty Islands. Evidence is also offered that Western Oceanic languages are descended from the Oceanic dialect chain remaining in the north New Britain area after the departure of speakers of the communalects ancestral to the Admiralties and Central/Eastern Oceanic languages.