The Papuan languages of Yapen Island: History and typology

The Yawa-Saweru language family is a group of closely related Papuan languages spoken in the central parts of Yapen Island in Cenderawasih Bay, Indonesia. Until a few decades ago, the Yawa-Saweru family was considered to consist of a single language, an isolate. Attempts to establish genealogical relationships with other language groups have produced inconclusive results, largely due to the absence of descriptions and of well-substantiated reconstructions. This thesis describes aspects of the synchronic grammars of Yawa-Saweru varieties and presents bottom up reconstructions of their common ancestor, Proto-Yawa-Saweru (PYS). A corpus of language data from various locations on Yapen Island is first compiled and then analysed, showing that the family consists of at least three highly divergent (and mutually unintelligible) varieties. Those three varieties, represented by the regiolects spoken on the island of Saweru and in the two villages Turu and Ambaidiru are described in terms of their phonology, morphology and syntax. Subsequently, aspects of PYS are reconstructed by rigorous application of the comparative method, with a special focus on recognizing the possible effects of language contact, as Yapen Island has historically been an area of strong Papuan-Austronesian language contact. The study reconstructs the phonology of PYS as well as a lexicon of over 300 words. It also reconstructs multiple aspects of PYS morphology and (morpho-)syntax: it provides paradigms of PYS argument indices, gender markers and possession markers and also reconstructs complex predicates and clause chains to PYS. Finally, the clustering of innovations and the subgrouping of Yawa-Saweru are interpreted using multiple models of representation of linguistic diversification.