The Diachrony of Word Prosody inthe Maˈya-Salawati Languagesof Raja Ampat

In this paper, I reconstruct the word-prosodic system of Proto-Maˈya- Salawati, the parent of several Austronesian languages of the Raja Ampat archipelago in northwest New Guinea. The aim of this reconstruction is twofold. First, word-prosodic changes in the daughter languages provide evidence for the subclassification of this branch, thus contributing to our understanding of language history in this little-known area. Second, the synchronic word-prosodic systems of the daughter languages are genealogically and typologically unusual in two ways: (i) they are all tonal, which is highly uncommon in the Austronesian language family, and (ii) several additionally have contrastive stress, an extremely rare combination crosslinguistically. This paper thus contributes to our theoretical understanding of mechanisms for tone change, as well as how orthogonal systems of lexical tone and lexical stress can emerge and decline. I will conclude that Proto-Maˈya-Salawati itself can be reconstructed with both tone and lexical stress and that several typologically uncommon phonological changes have occurred in the daughter languages—in particular, tone changes conditioned by vowel height and prosodic developments conditioned by syllable loss.