Pacific Linguistics logo and title

Announcement

We are delighted to announce that, from 2012, Pacific Linguistics will become the Pacific Linguistics series published by De Gruyter Mouton in Berlin.

The Studies in Language Change subseries will become an independent De Gruyter Mouton series .

From when it began in 1963, Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas. Over 600 books have been published, most on lesser-known languages. The series has brought these to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.

The move to De Gruyter Mouton will give our publications exposure to a larger audience, including those with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history.

The Editorial Board will continue to be based at ANU, and the Pacific Linguistics series will continue to present linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, atlases, bibliographies and other materials concerned with languages of the the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia, as well as language learning materials in the region’s major lingua francas.

Pacific Linguistics' publishing procedures will now be those of De Gruyter Mouton. The procedure for submitting book proposals is available here.

Procedures for submitting camera-ready copy are on the De Gruyter Mouton website here. Under the heading Templates three types of Microsoft Word template are provided: for monographs, for edited works, and for the Mouton Grammar Library. There is also a LaTeX template. Beneath these are links to Mouton's general style sheet and the Mouton Grammar Library stylesheet. Authors should choose the style sheet and template which most closely matches their needs: if it is a grammar, then choose the Mouton Grammar Library style sheet and template.

Pacific Linguistics Board

October 2011

PL publications are mostly in the form of printed books, but some are published in electronic format. All our publications currently in print are listed on the catalogue page. Out-of-print Pacific Linguistics publications are available in PDF format, and the Out of Print Catalogue is available as a PDF. There are also pages here devoted to teaching materials in the region's major lingua francas, bibliographies, and the Studies in Language Change series.

The page entitled ‘Free materials' has links to materials which we are making available as a courtesy to the linguist public. These materials are freely downloadable (copyright remains vested in their authors). These are distinct from PL’s electronic publications, which are included in the catalogue.

There are various ways of contacting us.

ICAAL proceedings New!
Austroasiatic Studies: Papers from ICAAL 4, vols. 1 & 2

The proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistic may be downloaded free.

Mali New!
Mali (Baining) grammar Tonya N. Stebbins

Mali is a Papuan language of the Baining family, spoken on the Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The family has five members: Kaket, Mali, Simbali, Ura and Kairak. Baining people share a common non-Austronesian ancestral language and similar cultural practices (such as fire dances). An interesting feature of these languages is that they show a great deal of influence from their early Austronesian neighbors. This is the first comprehensive grammar for a Baining language and provides a framework for further comparative and descriptive research in the region. The grammar has been published alongside a dictionary and text collection (also available from Pacific Linguistics).

Malgana New!
A salvage grammar of Malgana, the language of Shark Bay, Western Australia Andrew Gargett

There are no longer any speakers of the West Australian Aboriginal language Malgana who have any degree of fluency, and the series of analyses in this report are based on data from audio tapes made in the middle of the last decade of the 20th century, as well as various written materials produced over more than 150 years. This grammar is therefore an attempt to salvage from the scarce material available as complete a description of Malgana as possible.

Tamambo Tamambo, the language of west Malo, Vanuatu Dorothy G. Jauncey

Tamambo is a previously undescribed language of northern Vanuatu, now spoken by approximately 4000 people. It is a conservative Oceanic language, reflecting many of the consonant phonemes posited for Proto Oceanic (POc); lexically, many Tamambo words are reflexes of those posited for POc. This is a grammatical description of Tamambo; it is a nominative-accusative language, and is primarily head-marking. The description includes analysis of the considerable derivational morphology, possessive constructions, serial verb constructions, and an animacy hierarchy that interrelates with various aspects of the grammar.

Walsh festschrift New!
Language and social identity in Australian Indigenous communities: Papers in honour of Michael Walsh edited by Brett Baker, Ilana Mushin, Mark Harvey and Rod Gardner

For almost 40 years, Michael Walsh has been working alongside Indigenous people: documenting language, music and other traditional knowledge, acting on behalf of claimants to land in the Northern Territory, and making crucial contributions to the revitalisation of Aboriginal languages in NSW. This volume, with contributions from colleagues and students, celebrates his abiding interest in and commitment to Indigenous society with papers on two broad themes. ‘Language, identity and country’ addresses the often complex relations between Aboriginal social groups and countries, and linguistic identity. In ‘Language, identity and social action’ authors discuss the role that language plays in maintaining social identities in the realms of conversation, story-telling, music, language games, and in education. The volume will be of interest to students of linguistics, Indigenous studies, anthropology, and sociology.

Bindanderean New!
The Binanderean languages of Papua New Guinea: reconstruction and subgrouping Jacinta Smallhorn

This book breaks new ground with a historical-comparative study of the Binanderean languages of the Morobe and Oro Provinces of southeast mainland Papua New Guinea, a subgroup of the Trans New Guinea family. The author reconstructs the phonology, core lexicon, and some bound morphology of Proto Binandere. She uses shared innovations to construct a family tree, and also discusses the occurrence of parallel phonological changes among Binanderean languages. Binanderean lexical and morphological data are then compared with those of Guhu-Samane, a language long considered to be the closest external relative of the Binanderean family. Evidence of this relationship is presented, along with grounds for excluding it from the family. Finally, the author gives lexical comparisons between Binanderean and four other putative eastern New Guinea subgroups of the Trans New Guinea family, and shows that Binanderean is indeed a likely member of the family.

Oceanic lexicon Animals The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society

4: Animals Edited by Malcolm Ross, Andrew Pawley and Meredith Osmond

This is the fourth in a series of seven volumes on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the ancestor of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Each volume deals with a particular domain of culture and/or environment and consists of a collection of essays each of which presents and comments on lexical reconstructions of a particular semantic field within that domain. Volume 4 examines the terms that Proto Oceanic speakers used to name animals and parts of animals.