Topics in Oceanic Morphosyntax

The Oceanic languages, a subgroup within the Austronesian language family, comprise at least 450 languages in the geographical area encompassing Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. The articles in this book deal with morphosyntactic properties related to sentence types and nominal expressions in under-explored and endangered Oceanic languages. These properties may vary within the family, they give rise to new empirical generalizations, and they illustrate properties that are relevant for theoretical developments in modern linguistic theory.

Auteur

Claire Moyse-Faurie, LACITO-CNRS, Villejuif, France; Joachim Sabel, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Résumé

This monograph is a collection of selected papers on Oceanic languages. For the first time, aspects of the morphology and syntax of Oceanic languages such as the encoding of sentence types, the structure of the noun phrase, noun incorporation, constituent order, and ergative vs. accusative alignment are discussed from a comparative point of view, thus drawing attention to genetic, areal and language-specific features. The individual papers are based on the field work of the authors on lesser-described and endangered languages and are basically descriptive studies. At the same time they also explore the theoretical implications of the data presented and analyzed, as well as the historical development of certain morpho-syntactic phenomena, without basing these explorations on a single theoretical framework.

The book provides new insights into the morphosyntactic structures of Oceanic languages and is of interest primarily for linguists working on Austronesian, in particular Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian languages, but also for typologists and linguists working on language change.