Mekong–Mamberamo linguistic area explained
The Mekong–Mamberamo linguistic area is a linguistic area proposed by David Gil (2015).[1] It combines the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area with the languages of the Nusantara archipelago and western New Guinea. The linguistic area covers Mainland Southeast Asia, Malaysia (including both peninsular Malaysia and Borneo), and all of Indonesia except for the parts of central New Guinea that are located east of the Mamberamo River.
Features
Gil (2015:271) lists 17 features that are characteristic of the Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area.
- passing gesture
- repeated dental clicks expressing amazement
- conventionalized greeting with ‘where’
- ‘eye day’ > ‘sun’ lexicalization
- d/t place-of-articulation asymmetry
- numeral classifiers
- verby adjectives
- basic SVO word order
- iamitive perfects
- ‘give’ causatives
- low differentiation of adnominal attributive constructions
- weakly developed grammatical voice
- isolating word structure
- short words
- low grammatical-morpheme density
- optional thematic-role flagging
- optional tense–aspect–mood marking
Notes and References
- Gil, David. 2015. ‘The Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area?’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
