Oceanic Linguistics, vol.
Some cognates span the entire width of the Australian continent.
The degree of plausibility of each putative cognate is quantified on a scale from zero to five, in keeping, for example, with the Kluge etymological dictionary of German, which qualifies many etymologies with vielleicht 'perhaps', unklar 'unclear', and so forth. The tabulation of the 25 cognate sets is preceded by a discussion of a number of problems on the phonological, morphological, and semantic levels that arise in Pama-Nyungan comparative work. Interestingly, a number of these problems, such as sporadic word-initial nasal gradation, sporadic medial prenasalization, and sporadic vowel fronting, have parallels in Austronesian. Possessive-Like Attribute Constructions in the Oceanic Languages of Northwest Melanesia, pp. I briefly describe these constructions, which are morphosyntactically varied, then examine their history, proposing that a major factor in their genesis was the presence in Proto-Oceanic of a small class of adjectival nouns whose reflexes in languages scattered across Oceania either may still behave as noun phrase heads or retain features reflecting this earlier status.