Introduction to the Special Issue on “Possession in the languages of Wallacea”

Abstract

Abstract The area between the Wallace Line and Lydekker’s Line in eastern Indonesia and East Timor has long been recognized as a transitional zone between the flora and fauna of Asia and Oceania. More recently, Linguistic Wallacea, shifted slightly eastward from Biological Wallacea, has been established as a transitional zone between the Southeast Asian and Melanesian linguistic types. This volume focuses on grammatical systems of possession in Linguistic Wallacea, discussing both Austronesian and Papuan languages of the region. Typical traits include Possessor–Possessum word order and alienability contrasts, among others. The cross-familial distribution of these features suggests longstanding language contact throughout the area with borrowing both from Papuan languages into Austronesian ones and vice versa.