Endangered and Lesser Studied Languages Dialects4 Western Austronesian Applicative Constructions

This book presents a construction-based, typological analysis of applicatives in 85 western Austronesian languages, showing how these verbal constructions developed from earlier Philippine-type symmetrical voice alternations, retaining key inherited commonalities while also exhbiting diverse, innovative properties of form and meaning. Applicative constructions are a distinctive grammatical feature of the Austronesian languages of western Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Applicatives in these languages show varied syntactic and semantic properties, and are closely connected to causativization, aspectual meanings, and symmetrical voice. As a result, they do not fit neatly into 'canonical' patterns for applicatives. This book adopts a construction-based, typologically-grounded approach, treating applicatives as pairings of form and meaning. Data from 85 languages are analyzed systematically, combining careful description with quantitative methods and extensive use of geomapping to explore the diverse properties of applicatives in this region and their diachronic development.