Austronesians in the Northern Waters?

The following lines are inspired by John Kupchik’s seminal article ‘Austronesian Lights the Way’ that appears in this volume of JEAL. It demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt for the first time that there are reliable Austronesian loanwords in Japonic that reveal quite ancient and profound contacts, because without these profound contacts the borrowing of the names of the most basic celestial bodies, such as the sun and the moon, would not be possible. In my opinion, his article opened a new and an exciting direction in the Japonic historical linguistics. There are, however, two important differences between Kupchik’s article and the present one. First, while Kupchik mostly concentrated on the Amis language from Taiwan, and to a less extent on the languages of Philippines and other Western Malayo- Polynesian, my major focus is on the Philippines languages as potential donors, and much less on other Austronesian languages of the region. Second, while Kupchik looked mostly on mysterious words in the Omoro Sōshi, a collection of Old Okinawan and Amami sacred and folk poems (1531–1623 AD), this article focuses more on Old Japanese in particular and Japonic in general.

Austronesian Lights the Way: The Origins of the Words for ‘Sun’ and Other Celestial Voca bulary in Old Ryukyuan

This paper examines the evidence for historical contacts between Ryukyuans and Austronesians and uses this as a starting point to explore the borrowing of celestial vocabulary from Austronesian languages into Proto or Old Ryukyuan. The previous hypotheses for the etymology of Proto-Ryukyuan *tenda ‘sun’ are discussed in detail, and this is followed by discussions on Old Ryukyuan words meaning ‘sun’, ‘sun, light’, ‘heaven’ and ‘moon’. In all of these cases it is argued the most plausible source languages are Austronesian, based on strong phonetic and semantic correspondences, geographic proximity to the Ryukyus or the Old Ryukyuan trade route, shared celestial worship, as well as the lack of cognates in Japanese.

Subjects in Austronesian

In LFG, grammatical functions are primitives of the theory and treated as both fundamental and universal. However, there is a long standing debate in the wider literature as to whether grammatical functions should be considered universal or language specific/construction-specific notions. Western Austronesian languages have played a large role in this debate on account of their unusual verbal morphology and the split in typical subject properties between the actor semantic role and the argument privileged by the verbal morphology. In this chapter, Hemmings addresses the debate in relation to empirical data from the Kelabit language of Northern Sarawak. She argues that the Kelabit data provides a number of arguments for treating the privileged argument as subject, and the actor as an object in non-actor voice constructions. This has important implications for the treatment of subjects crosslinguistically, Western Austronesian verbal morphology and linking theories.

Adverbs in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan

This is a study of adverbs in nine typologically divergent Austronesian languages of Taiwan, Atayal, Bunun, Favorlang, Kavalan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Thao, and Tsou. There are only a few adverbs in each of these languages. The form of an adverb is usually invariant and its position in a sentence is relatively free. On the contrary, the form of a verb usually varies and its position in the sentence is usually fixed. Since the function of an adverb is to modify a verb, it may not occur without a verb in a sentence, whereas a true verb may occur without any other verb. Many adverbial concepts in Chinese and English, such as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘often’, and ‘again’, are expressed using verbs that manifest different foci and take aspect markers. When these words function as the main verb in the sentence, they may attract bound personal pronouns in many Austronesian languages of Taiwan. However, there are a few genuine adverbs in each of these languages. It varies from language to language whether a certain lexical item functions as a verb or adverb.

Two types of alignment change in nominalizations

This paper investigates two instances of alignment change, both of which resulted from reanalysis of a nominalized embedded clause type, in which the external argument was marked with genitive case and the internal argument was focused. We show that a subject marked with genitive case in the early development of Austronesian languages became ergative-marked when object relative clauses in cleft constructions were reanalyzed as transitive root clauses. In contrast to this, the genitive case in Old Japanese nominalized clauses, marking an external argument, was extended to mark all subjects. This occurred after adnominal clauses were reanalyzed as root clauses. Japanese underwent one more step in order for genitive to be reanalyzed as nominative: the reanalysis of impersonal psych transitive constructions as intransitives. With these two case studies of Austronesian and Japanese, we show that reanalysis of nominalization goes in either direction, ergative or accusative, depending on the syntactic conditions involved in the reanalysis.

Syntactic conditions on accusative to ergative alignment change in Austronesian languages

This paper develops the proposal put forth by Aldridge (2015, 2016) for the emergence of ergative alignment in a first-order subgroup of the Austronesian family. I first provide new evidence for reconstructing Proto-Austronesian (PAn) as accusative rather than ergative. I then propose a significantly revised approach to Aldridge’s proposed reanalysis. On the basis of evidence from Tsou, I propose that the reanalysis took place in biclausal constructions embedded under motion or locative verbs. Since such biclausal constructions are contexts for restructuring, no accusative case is available for an object. This forced objects which needed structural licensing to value nominative case with T. I additionally show that subjects were assigned inherent non-nominative case in PAn when objects needed to enter into Agree with T, as when valuing nominative case. These conditions yielded a new ergative clause type in a daughter of PAn, which Aldridge (2015, 2016) calls “Proto-Ergative Austronesian”. No change took place in clauses lacking an object needing structural licensing. Consequently, subjects in intransitive clauses and transitive clauses with indefinite objects continued to surface with nominative case, yielding the type of ergative alignment prevalent in Formosan and Philippine languages today.

Alignment shift as functional markedness reversal

In this paper, we propose treating alignment shift as a process of functional markedness reversal in the domain of semantically transitive constructions. We illustrate how this approach allows us to capture similarities between the alignment shifts in Eskimo-Aleut and Western Austronesian languages, despite morphosyntactic differences in their voice systems. Using three diagnostics of functional markedness (semantic transitivity, topic continuity of P, and discourse frequency), we compare antipassive and ergative constructions in Eskimo-Aleut varieties and actor voice (av) and undergoer voice (uv) constructions in Western Austronesian varieties. We argue that ergative alignment is equivalent to a functionally unmarked P-prominent construction (e.g., ergative, uv), whilst accusative alignment is equivalent to a functionally unmarked A-prominent construction (e.g., antipassive, av). On this basis, we claim that both language groups are undergoing a parallel shift from ergative to accusative, since A-prominent constructions are functionally marked in more conservative varieties, but lose their functionally marked character and begin to function as unmarked transitive constructions in more innovative varieties.

Relative Clauses in Minangkabau, Indonesian, English Languages (Typology Study)

Minangkabau and Indonesian languages are an Austronesian. In this study, it was focused on the typology study of three different languages, namely: Minangkabau, Indonesian, and English relative clauses. It aimed to find out the differences and the similarities of relative clauses among the three languages. This paper also outlines the Accessibility Hierarchy approach to the facts that describe building on relative clause construction. The data was taken from some conversations with Minangkabaunese friends and feedback from the writer as a native speaker of the language in the analysis as well as taking the findings of recent typological and theoretical studies of Austronesian languages into consideration. From the analysis, it is found that Minangkabau and Indonesian languages are same contsruction and the english is different between Minangkabau and Indonesian languages. In the English, it is also possible to have object focus which called object fronting.

Kuatnya Jejak Ke-Austronesia-an pada Bahasa Bali Dialek Bali Aga

The Balinese language is spatially divided into the Balinese dialect of Bali Aga (DBA) and the dialect of Bali Dataran (DBD). As a sub-family of Austronesian languages, the Balinese language has many features of being Austronesian. This study at analyzes the trace of the Bali Aga dialect, through four linguistic variables: the realization of the phoneme /a/, the distribution of phonemes /h/, bimonosilabel words, and personal pronouns. Data sources of this research are Balinese in the DBA area, general Balinese language, and Balinese inscriptions and dictionaries which were collected using the scrutinize and interview methods and analyzed by using comparative and distributional approaches. The results showed that the Austronesian traces in the Bali Aga dialect are still strong, indicated by (1) the persistence of [a] as a realization of the phoneme /a/ in the ultima position; (2) the persistence of /h/ in the initial and medial positions; (3) the persistence of penultima syllable coda on bimonosilabis words; (4) the persistence of Proto Austronesian pronouns. These indicate that the archaic data are very important in tracking language change.