I’m Christina L. Truong

Linguist and language documentation practitioner

Address: 1890 East-West Road, Moore Hall 569, Honolulu, HI 96822 USA

Email: cltruong AT hawaii DOT edu

I’m a linguist and adjunct faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My research explores linguistic diversity and typology, verbal constructions, and language change. I’m interested in language documentation, Austronesian languages, syntax, phonology, typology, and language technology.  I’ve done fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia. During my time at UH, I have especially enjoyed teaching undergraduates about the linguistic history and diversity of the Pacific and joining in projects with other language documentation practitioners in North America, Asia, and the Pacific.

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Book: Western Austronesian Applicative Constructions

byChristina Truong September 16, 2025 No Comments

New book, released August 2025. Now available for order in print and Open Access download.

Christina L. Truong. 2025. Western Austronesian applicative constructions: Continuity and change in form and meaning. Endangered and Lesser-Studied Languages and Dialects 4. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-73712-9. vxi + 364 pp.

Applicative constructions are a distinctive grammatical feature of the Austronesian languages of western Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei—a geographic region referred to as West Nusantara. 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. This work demonstrates how applicatives in West Nusantara languages developed from earlier Philippine-type symmetrical voice constructions—still commonly exhibited by western Austronesian languages of Taiwan and the Philippines—while also showing innovative and diverse characteristics resulting from language change.

Contents
1 Introduction
2 Case study: Sundanese applicatives
3 Towards a typologically-grounded, constructional approach to applicatives
4 The distribution of applicatives in West Nusantara: A bird’s eye view
5 Interpreting distributional patterns through geographic typology
6 Properties of applicative constructions and their distribution in West Nusantara
7 A functional typology of applicative constructions in languages of West Nusantara

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Towards a typology of pseudo antipassives in Western Austronesian languages

byChristina Truong June 11, 2025 No Comments

Christina L. Truong & Victoria Chen

Paper presented at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 11 June 2025

Slides here

While Austronesian is widely considered a hotspot for antipassive constructions, closer investigation challenges this view. Various western Austronesian languages known as the Philippine-type have been claimed to exhibit a voice system that denotes the alternation of the basic transitive with a corresponding antipassive. However, our survey of 53 representative languages spanning Taiwan and Maritime Southeast Asia reveals instead that genuine antipassives are rarely attested in western Austronesian languages when existing criteria established in the typological literature are strictly applied to the alleged antipassive construction—commonly referred to in the literature as Actor Voice. We further demonstrate how these putative antipassives form a continuum of semi-transitive constructions, characterized by a general decrease in semantic transitivity while often still featuring a patient that retains various traits of a core argument. This continuum not only enhances our understanding of how antipassive-like constructions may develop over time, but it also suggests that syntactic intransitivity is not necessarily the endpoint of discourse-driven changes that reduce clausal transitivity. Moreover, it undermines the prevalent ergative view of western Austronesian languages and lends new support to accusative and symmetrical voice analyses, both of which maintain that the typologically peculiar Austronesian system of voice alternations does not alter clausal transitivity. Austronesian pseudo-antipassives thus underscore the importance of approaching typological classifications with caution and situating language-specific analyses within the broader typological literature.

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Western Austronesian Applicative Constructions: Continuity and Change in Form and Function

byChristina Truong June 11, 2025

Christina L. Truong

Forthcoming monograph published by Brill. Publisher link.

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 ‘canonincal’ patterns for applicatives. This book adopts a construction-based, typologically-grounded approach, treating applicatives as pairings of form and meaning. Data from 85 languages is 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