Bradley McDonnell & Christina L. Truong
Book chapter in Applicative Constructions in the World’s Languages edited by Fernando Zuniga and Denis Creissels
This chapter provides an overview of applicative constructions in a sample of eight Austronesian languages of western Indonesia. Following an orientation to the languages (§ 2) and the forms of their applicatives affixes (§ 3), we describe the semantic and syntactic properties of applicative constructions according to possible roles for the applied phrase. These include beneficiaries and recipients (§ 4), instruments and themes (§ 5), goals, locations, and addressees (§ 6), and other roles found in transitivizing constructions, e.g. content phrases and stimuli (§ 7). For each type, we note the syntactic status of the AppP and any companion phrase (the participant expressed as P in a corresponding base construction), and semantic characteristics of the AC and compatible base verbs. We find that all languages of the sample allow a beneficiary AppP and a theme companion phrase to both be expressed as core arguments in ditransitive clauses. However, when the AppP is an instrument or goal, some languages require that the companion phrase be realized as an oblique or unexpressed. Remaining sections discuss lookalike constructions where an applicative suffix shows only an aspectual or semantic effect (§ 8), and describe interactions between applicatives and causative morphology (§ 9) as well as applicatives and voice (§ 10).