Thurston William R. Processes of change in the languages of north-western New Britain

The Australian National University, Research School of Pacific Studies, 1987. — 164 p. — (Pacific Linguistics: Series B 99).Since writing A comparative study in Anem and Lusi (Thurston 1982), I have conducted two other field trips to north-western New Britain (NWNB) to focus on other languages which are either currently in contact with Anem, or which may have been in contact with Anem or one of its extinct relatives. With the assistance of Rick Goulden, an enormous body of data was collected on both trips, data which will fill in some of the lacunae in the knowledge of the languages of this area. In the current work, I have two purposes in mind: (1) to present data that have not been available before on the languages of the area, and (2) to update and elaborate the model of language change presented in the earlier work, which was written without access to the languages that are spoken in the interior of NWNB. Taking only Anem and Lusi into account was the major weakness of that study. To a small extent, I could predict what would be found in the last two field trips, but I could not have anticipated the scope of what these languages would reveal.