Abui Tripartite Verbs: exploring the limits of compositionality

Abui is a non-Austronesian (Papuan) language spoken in the Alor-Pantar Archipelago in Eastern Indonesia by about 16.000 people. A linguistic description of the northern Abui dialects is available (Stokhof 1984; Kratochvíl 2007). The Archipelago counts more than twenty languages, mostly not previously documented. These languages, with exception of Alorese and Malay, have been argued to belong to the Trans New Guinea family (cf. Pawley 2001; Ross 2005). The affiliation and internal subgrouping are currently investigated (Holton, Klamer and Kratochvíl 2009). The map in Figure 1 gives an overview of the linguistic situation of the Alor Island.