The Many Faces of Austronesian Voice Systems

The Many Faces of Austronesian Voice Systems
Author: I Wayan Arka
Publisher: Pacific Linguistics
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

The Ninth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics and the Fifth International Conference on Oceanic Linguistics were both held at The Australian National University in Canberra during January 2002. Rather than publish a single very diverse collection of conference papers, the organisers favoured a series of smaller compilations on specific topics. One such volume, on Austronesian historical phonology, has already been published by Pacific Linguistics as Issues in Austronesian historical phonology by John Lynch. The present volume represents another such compilation. It contains an introduction by the editors and ten papers on voice in Austronesian languages which provide both fresh data and some new perspectives on old problems. The papers touch on the many faces of Austronesian voice systems, ranging geographically from Teng on Puyuma in Taiwan to Otsuka on Tongan, typologically from voice in agglutinative languages in Taiwan and the Philippines to voice in isolating languages (Arka and Kosmas on Manggarai and Donohue on Palu'e), and in approach from Clayre's areal/historical survey of Kelabitic languages in Borneo to single-language studies of voice like Davies on Madurese, Quick on Pendau, and the Andersens on Moronene. Katagiri and Kaufman each take a fresh look at an aspect of Tagalog voice.

Grammatical Voice

Grammatical Voice
Author: Fernando Zúñiga
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1107159245

The first ever textbook devoted to the cross-linguistic study of voice, covering various topics and discussing data from numerous languages.

Austronesian Undressed

Austronesian Undressed
Author: David Gil
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027260532

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.

Prominence in Austronesian

Prominence in Austronesian
Author: Bethwyn Evans
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2024-01-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110730812

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.

Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages

Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages
Author: Sonja Riesberg
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2018
Genre: Austronesian languages
ISBN: 3961101086

Information structure is a relatively new field to linguistics and has only recently been studied for smaller and less described languages. This book is the first of its kind that brings together contributions on information structure in Austronesian languages. Current approaches from formal semantics, discourse studies, and intonational phonology are brought together with language specific and cross-linguistic expertise of Austronesian languages. The 13 chapters in this volume cover all subgroups of the large Austronesian family, including Formosan, Central Malayo-Polynesian, South Halmahera-West New Guinea, and Oceanic. The major focus, though, lies on Western Malayo-Polynesian languages. Some chapters investigate two of the largest languages in the region (Tagalog and different varieties of Malay), others study information-structural phenomena in small, underdescribed languages. The three overarching topics that are covered in this book are NP marking and reference tracking devices, syntactic structures and information-structural categories, and the interaction of information structure and prosody. Various data types build the basis for the different studies compiled in this book. Some chapters investigate written texts, such as modern novels (cf. Djenar’s chapter on modern, standard Indonesian), or compare different text genres, such as, for example, oral narratives and translations of biblical narratives (cf. De Busser’s chapter on Bunun). Most contributions, however, study natural spoken speech and make use of spoken corpora which have been compiled by the authors themselves. The volume comprises a number of different methods and theoretical frameworks. Two chapters make use of the Question Under Discussion approach, developed in formal semantics (cf. the chapters by Latrouite & Riester; Shiohara & Riester). Riesberg et al. apply the recently developed method of Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to investigate native speakers’ perception of prosodic prominences and boundaries in Papuan Malay. Other papers discuss theoretical consequences of their findings. Thus, for example, Himmelmann takes apart the most widespread framework for intonational phonology (ToBI) and argues that the analysis of Indonesian languages requires much simpler assumptions than the ones underlying the standard model. Arka & Sedeng ask the question how fine-grained information structure space should be conceptualized and modelled, e.g. in LFG. Schnell argues that elements that could be analysed as “topic” and “focus” categories, should better be described in terms of ‘packaging’ and do not necessarily reflect any pragmatic roles in the first place.

Antipassive

Antipassive
Author: Katarzyna Janic
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 655
Release: 2021-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027260265

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the morpho-syntactic and semantic aspects of the antipassive construction from synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives. The nineteen contributions assembled in this volume address a wide range of aspects pertinent to the antipassive construction, such as lexical semantics, the properties of the antipassive markers, as well as the issue of fuzzy boundaries between the antipassive construction and a range of other formally and functionally similar constructions in genealogically and areally diverse languages. Purely synchronically oriented case studies are supplemented by contributions that shed light on the diachronic development of the antipassive construction and the antipassive markers. The book should be of central interest to many scholars, in particular to those working in the field of language typology, semantics, syntax, and historical linguists, as well as to specialists of the language families discussed in the individual contributions.

Ay-Inversion in Tagalog

Ay-Inversion in Tagalog
Author: Patrick Nuhn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110755556

Tagalog, an Austronesian language, is widely spoken and understood throughout the Philippine archipelago where it served as the basis for the national language Filipino. The language is often cited for its many unusual linguistic properties. Drawing on both spoken fieldwork data and written data from novels, this study investigates several phenomena at Tagalog’s interface of information structure and morphosyntax. Aside from the default predicate-initial word order, the Tagalog language has several information-structurally marked constructions that allow other constituents to appear in the sentence initial position. One of these constructions is ay-inversion. Although it is often labeled a topic-marking construction, it is actually far more versatile. This book aims to explore some of its many facets. The investigation of ay-inversion begins with a survey of its various uses that appear in the data, including some that have to date received very little if any attention in the literature, such as reversed ang-inversion, which combines two of the language’s inversion constructions. Selected observations are then modeled in Role and Reference Grammar and their implications for Tagalog syntax are explored. Finally, the role of ay-inversion in anaphora resolution is investigated and selected processes are modeled in a frame-based account.

Polynesian Syntax and Its Interfaces

Polynesian Syntax and Its Interfaces
Author: Lauren Clemens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-08-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198860838

This volume brings together current research in theoretical syntax and its interfaces in the Polynesian language family. Chapters offer in-depth analyses of a range of theoretical issues of particular interest for comparative syntactic research, such as ergativity and case systems, negation, and the left periphery.