LANGUAGES OF AUSTRONESIA

The South Pacific is home to the largest language family in the world. Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar eastward through the Philippines and Indonesia to Polynesia, and from Taiwan and Hawaii southward to New Zealand. Although the more than one thousand languages can clearly be seen to be related genetically, they show fascinating typological variation. Some are nearly isolating, while others are polysynthetic. Some show clear nominative/accusative patterning (with subjects and objects), others show clear ergative/absolutive patterning, some show agent/patient patterning, and many show still other patterns or pattern combinations. Many show strong predicate-initial constituent order, but many others show strong Subject-Predicate-Object order. Austronesian languages raise intriguing questions about the universality of what many linguists consider a language universal: the distinction between nouns and verbs. A number of faculty members, visiting scholars, and doctoral students are actively working with speakers of various Austronesian languages on a wide range of topics, including phonology, morphology, lexical issues, argument categories and basic clause structure, voice alternations and their functions in connected speech, clause combining, anaphora in discourse, and more. Most of this work is based on a rich variety of genres, including not only narratives of various kinds, but also conversation and more formal oratory and political discourse. Work is also being carried out on the historical development of the languages in the family, in particular within the area of syntactic structure.

Core Faculty: Marianne Mithun

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