Seminars

All seminars are held in the RCLT Reading Room.

Taulil, Butam and the backmigration from New Ireland
For many years the Taulil and Butam languages have been grouped with the Baining languages as members of the New Britain branch of the Yele-Solomons-New Britain group of East Papuan languages. This paper proposes the reconsideration of the grouping of Taulil-Butam with the Baining languages and provides some speculative comments about higher order groupings within the New Britain branch of the Yele-Solomons-New Britain grouping. This is a preliminary report based on archival evidence as well as new linguistic materials derived from fieldwork in the Taulil, Mail and Simbali (Baining) communities and some more recently published materials from others on Sulka and Kuot. The paper will consider the relationship between Taulil and the other non-Austronesian languages of the region in terms of origins and migration, the history of language contact, comparative phonology, gender and noun class marking, pronouns and syntactic structure.

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