The Plural Word hire in Alorese: Contact-Induced Change from Neighboring Alor-Pantar Languages

This article discusses the plural word hire in Alorese, an Austronesian language
spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar, in eastern Indonesia. Following
the methodological requisites for contact-induced change, I claim that the
plural word hire emerged through contact with Papuan Alor-Pantar languages,
because (i) Alorese was and still is spoken in close contact with Alor-Pantar
languages; (ii) Alorese and the neighboring Alor-Pantar languages share the
presence of a plural word, and their plural words have similar syntactic and
semantic properties; (iii) Alor-Pantar languages had plural words before they
came into contact with Alorese; and (iv) Alorese did not have the plural word
hire before it came into contact with Alor-Pantar languages. The innovation of
hire is a case of contact-induced grammaticalization, whereby the form is
inherited and developed from an original third person plural pronoun going
back to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *si-ida, while the function of the plural word is borrowed from the neighboring Alor-Pantar languages.