Typology and geography in Eastern Indonesia 15 Selected papers from the 2007 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

Himmelmann (2005) identifies two typological profiles amongst the non-Oceanic Austronesian languages. One of these (the „symmetrical voice ‟ type) is associated with the more westerly part of the Austronesian region in Asia, while the other (the „preposed possessor‟ type) is found in eastern Indonesia, specifically in Timor, Maluku and West Papua, as well as in many Malay varieties. This second type is mainly restricted to a small geographic region, basically the Indonesian archipelago east of Sulawesi, while the first type occurs in a wider region including Taiwan, the Philippines, western Indonesia and Madagascar. Himmelmann lists eight features which characterise the preposed possessor type and this paper examines the geographic distribution of these eight features across languages of eastern Indonesia. The results show that some of the features are more reliable indicators of language type than others, and that there is mor