Plural number words in the Alor-Pantar languages

In this chapter, we investigate the variation in form, syntax and semantics of the plural words found across the Alor-Pantar languages. We study five AP languages: Western Pantar, Teiwa, Abui, Kamang and Wersing. We show that plural words in Alor-Pantar family are diachronically instable: although proto-Alor-Pantar had a plural number word *non, many AP languages have innovated new plural words. Plural words in these languages exhibit not only a wide variety of different syntactic properties but also variable semantics, thus likening them more to the range exhibited by affixal plural number than previously recognized