This volume honouring Malcolm Ross brings together essays in historical linguistics by 23 scholars, many on Ross's interests in Austronesian and Papuan languages, and others on methodology.

PART I (on language relationships) includes: (1) In ‘Remapping the Austronesian expansion' Roger Blench examines the geographic range of Austronesian influence. (2) ‘Robert Blust shows 'The historical value of single words' in providing key information about Austronesian language histories. (3) Bethwyn Evans begins to reconstruct the protolanguage of the (Papuan) South Bougainville family in ‘Beyond pronouns: further evidence for South Bougainville '. (4) Alexandre François analyses the history of a small group of Oceanic Austronesian languages in ‘The languages of Vanikoro: three lexicons and one grammar'. (5) In ‘Expanding character sets for phylogeny: a Slavic test case' Johanna Nichols shows how bound morphology can be used as characters for computational phylogenies. (6) Andrew Pawley's ‘Greenberg's Indo-Pacific hypothesis: an assessment' looks closely at the 1971 hypothesis about the relatedness of Tasmanian, Papuan and Andamanese languages. (7) Ger Reesink sees a possible historical connection between languages of the Bird's Head and (Proto) Oceanic. (8) In ‘How many branches in a tree? Cua and East (North) Bahnaric' Paul Sidwell solves an old problem in Mon-Khmer relationships. (9) Jacinta Smallhorn's ‘Binanderean as a member of the Trans New Guinea family' shows that a SE Papuan group is part of the TNG family. (10) In ‘The Papuan languages of the Eastern Bismarcks: migration, origins and connections' Tonya N. Stebbins examines evidence for relationship among languages of eastern New Britain and New Ireland .

PART II (on diachronic change) includes: (11) In ‘On the zero (voice) prefix and bare verbs in Austronesian languages of Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia' I Wayan Arka examines contrasting passive constructions at an assumed linguistic boundary in central Indonesia. (12) In ‘Dental discrepancies and the sound of Proto Austronesian' Mark Donohue looks at the typology of dental and alveolar stops and their distribution among Austronesian languages. (13) Robert Early examines how deictics have become relativisers in many Oceanic languages. (14) Paul Geraghty's ‘Nasal strengthening in the Fijian languages' gives instances of stops becoming nasals in the Oceanic languages of Fiji. (15) In ‘On reconstructing pronominal proto-paradigms: methodological considerations from the Pama-Nyungan language family of Australia ' Harold Koch discusses methods of reconstructing paradigms and their significance in determining language relationships. (16) Paul Jen-Kuei Li and Shigeru Tsuchida reconstruct non-productive infixes in ‘Yet more Proto Austronesian infixes'. (17) In ‘Proprietives in Oceanic' Frank Lichtenberk reconstructs the history of a formative deriving property-denoting words. (18) John Lynch addresses the development of non-decimal numeral systems from decimal systems in Vanuatu and New Caledonia in ‘At sixes and sevens'. (19) Anna Margetts describes the recent ‘Spread of the Saliba-Logea plural marker'. (20) Meredith Osmond and Andrew Pawley reconstruct ‘Verbs of perception in Proto Oceanic', and (21) Lawrence A. Reid provides a carefully reasoned argument for ‘The reconstruction of a dual pronoun to Proto Malayo-Polynesian'. (22) In their ‘From ki-N "get N" in Formosan languages to ki-V "get V-ed" (passive) in Rukai, Paiwan and Puyuma', Elizabeth Zeitoun and Stacy Teng discuss parallel development vs contact-induced change in certain Austronesian languages of Taiwan.