Austronesian and Theoretical Linguistics

The Austronesian language family is the largest language family in the world, yet its members are relatively little studied, particularly from a formal perspective. Interestingly, because these languages exhibit typologically unusual properties, they pose important challenges to linguistic theory.

Any theory that postulates a grammar that is common to all languages must take into account the particular characteristics of this language family. The contributions to this volume comprise five chapters on phonology and twelve chapters on syntax, all addressing aspects of these Austronesian challenges. The volume presents new data, new analyses of old data, and comparisons of closely related languages, as well as comparisons to languages outside of the language family. Taken together they form a unique picture of Austronesian linguistics. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and language typology, as well as scholars of Austronesian languages.