Lexical history in the Northwest Solomonic languages. Forthcoming in John Bowden and Nikolaus Himmelmann, eds, A Journey through Austronesian and Papuan linguistic and cultural space: Papers in honour of Andrew K. Pawley. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pdf
Reconstructing the history of the Bel languages. pdf [A version of this paper was presented as a keynote address to the Third conference of the UK Austronesian Research Group on Austronesian languages and linguistics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, September 2007. The paper requires further work.]
Calquing and metatypy. Journal of Language Contact, Thema 1:116–143. [The journal is on line here.]
Some Proto Austronesian coronals reexamined. pdf [This was a working paper. I would not defend all its arguments today.]
Primary subgroups of Austronesian: a consideration of some hypotheses. pdf [This was a working paper. I would not defend all its arguments today.]
Clues to the linguistic situation in Near Oceania before agriculture. Paper for presentation at the symposium Historical linguistics and hunter-gatherer populations in global perspective, MPI-EVA Leipzig, 10–12 August 2006. pdf
Language contact and language decay: reflections from Papua New Guinea. Paper presented to the Third Oxford-Kobe Linguistics Seminar, The Linguistics of Endangered Languages, at the St. Catherine's College (University of Oxford) Kobe Institute, Kobe, Japan, 2 to 5 April 2006.pdf
The argument structure of undergoer voice clauses in Formosan and other Philippine-type languages. Paper presented to AFLA 13, Hsinchu, 24 to 26 March 2006. pdf
The Batanic languages in relation to the early history of the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of Austronesian. Journal of Austronesian Studies 1/2:1-24. pdf
Exploring metatypy: how does contact-induced typological change come about? Keynote talk given at the Australian Linguistic Society's annual meeting, Perth, 1999. pdf
Tonogenesis in the North Huon Gulf chain. In: Jerold A. Edmondson and Kenneth J. Gregerson (eds) Tonality in Austronesian languages. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication. No 24. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 133-153. [The published version contains numerous errors of formatting. The pdf here has been reformatted, corrected and slightly updated to take account of additional information on Bukawa provided by Bill Eckermann.]
[Malcolm Ross and David Lithgow], and. The prehistory of some Western Oceanic tense/mood markers: insights from natural morphosyntax [This unpublished draft was written in 1989. I have decided to make it available here as it has been cited in one or two places. David Lithgow died in 1994.]