An essential source of reference for this linguistic community, as well as for linguists working on typology and syntax.

This volume seeks to foreground a borderless history and geography of South, Southeast, and East Asian littoral zones that would be maritime-focused, and thereby explore the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured the encounters among the cultures found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific, from the early historical period to the present. Transcending the artificial boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, and trying to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) high cultures (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, or Islamicate) and local or indigenous cultures, this multidisciplinary volume explores the metaphor of Monsoon Asia as a vast geo-environmental area inhabited by speakers of numerous language phyla, which for millennia has formed an integrated system of littorals where crops, goods, ideas, cosmologies, and ritual practices circulated on the sea-routes governed by the seasonal monsoon winds. The collective body of work presented in the volume describes Monsoon Asia as an ideal theatre for circulatory dynamics of cultural transfer, interaction, acceptance, selection, and avoidance, and argues that, despite the rich ethnic, linguistic and sociocultural diversity, a shared pattern of values, norms, and cultural models is discernible throughout the region.

The cognitive concept of prominence is increasingly seen as key to understanding the organisation of grammar. This volume explores the encoding of prominence in languages from across the Austronesian family. The contributions show how prominence is relevant to understanding asymmetries at different levels of grammatical structure, from discourse and information structure to argument expression and socio-pragmatics. Moreover, common themes across contributions point to crosslinguistic tendencies that underpin the conventionalisation of communicative patterns for coordinating interlocutors' attention, and to points of departure for further crosslinguistic exploration of how grammatical asymmetries can be explained in terms of prominence.

This book explores nominalization processes in Totoli (Sulawesi, Indonesia) within the context of western Austronesian symmetrical voice languages. The main focus is on lexical nominalizations, especially on action nominal constructions derived with pV-/pVN-/pVg- and kV-. By means of corpus data, the book provides a characterization of the form and the functions of these constructions and their hybrid nominal and verbal nature. It then investigates the role of nominalization (and subordination) in information packaging using the concept of at-issueness. Finally, it provides a systematic survey of nominalization constructions in 67 western Austronesian symmetrical voice languages.

Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili. The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact.

Austronesian is the largest language family on earth: Some 1300 languages, 20% of the world's total, are spoken by 270 million people in a region that extends from Easter Island in the Pacific 10,000 miles west to Madagascar off the coast of Africa. Many of the languages in this diverse and linguistically rich region are undocumented and in imminent danger of extinction. This book provides a critical account of current knowledge, reviews the state of the documentation of languages in the region, and considers the linguistic effects of government policies and economic change. The editor's introduction draws out the key issues and themes. An overview of the Austronesian language family then examines the historical relations between the languages, their diversity, and their distribution in the region and describes the nature and aims of contemporary research. Individual chapters are then devoted to the revitalization of languages in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor, and Vanuatu. This pioneering account of one of the world's most linguistically rich regions offers direction and impetus to research in linguistics and anthropology, and holds out the means of saving many endangered languages and cultures.

Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages is a collection of papers devoted to the syntactic analysis of modification and extraction strategies in Austronesian languages such as Kavalan, Malagasy, Niuean, Seediq, and Tagalog. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, it elucidates the categorial and phrase structural status as well as the scopal behavior of sentence-level adverbs, ordering constraints on adjectival modifiers, and the nature of unbounded dependencies in interaction with Philippine-type voice systems. Guglielmo Cinque's universal ordering hypothesis for adverbs and current work on remnant movement serve as theoretical points of reference. More particularly the book contains an analysis of lower VP-adverbs in Kavalan as serial verbs (Chang), a defense of two types of adverbial heads in Seediq (Holmer), an account of possible DP-internal serializations in Niuean in terms of remnant movement (Kahnemuyipour Massam), a plea for relative, scope-based adverb ordering in Tagalog (Kaufman), a clefting approach to unbounded dependencies in Malagasy (Potsdam), a critical assessment of constraints on remnant movement as applied to adverb orderings in Malagasy (Thiersch), and an analysis of the Malagasy voice system on the basis of clitic left-dislocation (Travis). The editors' introduction undertakes a critical survey of the relevant empirical and theoretical background. A substantial part of the empirical facts are presented here for the first time, and the book will inspire additional systematic investigation of the often neglected aspects of modificational strategies in Austronesian languages. The book will be of value to linguists interested in contemporary syntactic analysis and to everyone seeking a deeper understanding of the formal properties of Austronesian.

This volume presents the most wide-ranging treatment available today of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and varied sociolinguistic issues that characterize this group of languages, including current debates in their prehistories and descriptive priorities for future study. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with historical linguistics, including discussion of human genetics, archaeology, and cultural history. Chapters in Part II explore language contact between Malayo-Polynesian and unrelated languages, as well as sociolinguistic issues such as multilingualism, language policy, and language endangerment. Part III provides detailed overviews of the different groupings of Malayo-Polynesian languages, while Part IV offers in-depth studies of important typological features across the whole linguistic area. The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia will be an essential reference for students and researchers specializing in Austronesian languages and for typologists and comparative linguists more broadly.

This book is an in-depth study of the voice systems of Totoli, Balinese, Indonesian, and Tagalog, which shows that the symmetrical nature of these systems poses a problem to current linking theories. It provides an analysis of symmetrical linking within two grammatical theories (LFG & RRG) and develops a modified LFG linking mechanism that sheds light on the differences as well as the similarities of symmetrical and asymmetrical voice systems.

The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a survey of the field covering the methods which underpin current work; models of language change; and the importance of historical linguistics for other subfields of linguistics and other disciplines. Divided into five sections, the volume encompass a wide range of approaches and addresses issues in the following areas: historical perspectives methods and models language change interfaces regional summaries Each of the thirty-two chapters is written by a specialist in the field and provides: a introduction to the subject; an analysis of the relationship between the diachronic and synchronic study of the topic; an overview of the main current and critical trends; and examples from primary data. The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area. Chapter 28 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315794013.ch28