Category: Work

Book: Western Austronesian Applicative Constructions

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

Documentation of Baduy

Research assistantship for Documenting the endangered Indonesian language of the Baduy Dalam (NSF-supported project). August 2020 – July 2022.

This project is an international collaboration with researchers at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, teaming up to document the language of the Baduy Dalam ‘Inner Baduy,’ a small group of about 1170 living in a remote area on the island of Java in Indonesia. The team will record natural speech (narratives and conversations) and lexical items to produce an audio and video transcribed corpus of Baduy Dalam speech, a dictionary (with special focus on culturally distinctive concepts), and a grammar sketch. Materials are archived at Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, where they will be accessible to other researchers and the general public. Broader impacts include producing print and video materials for direct use by the Baduy as linguistic and cultural education resources.

Responsibilities include: Archiving, data management, transcription, lexical database design & management.

Language documentation with the Semai community

Bilinski Educational Foundation Grant. Summer 2019.

Semai is an indigenous language of Pennisular Malaysia which remains underdocumented and underdescribed despite its relatively large number of speakers. Alongside community members, recordings of vowel contrasts, wordlists, personal and traditional narratives, and elicitation with and without stimuli were produced. Materials to be archived in Kaipuleohone Language Archive.

Alaska Native Place Names

Research assistantship for Collaborative Research: Linking Maps, Manuscripts, and Place Names Data to Improve Environmental Knowledge in Alaska Project (NSF-supported project). Spring 2019.

This project will compile a geographic database linking place name data found on historic Alaskan maps, manuscripts, and within oral histories and printed materials. The project framework integrates full GIS capabilities with multilingual audio, video, and text to reveal connections between named places and socio-ecological dimensions of landscape, including knowledge of local ecosystems and cultural values, adaptation and resilience.

Responsibilities include: Editing and management of geolinguistic datasets, preparation of data. Building and configuring online atlases using Nunaliit, an open source atlas framework running on Linux OS.

Browse a sample atlas from the project.

Languages of Sulawesi

Bilinski Educational Foundation Grant. Summer 2018.

Many indigenous languages of Sulawesi remain underdocumented and many more are underdescribed. Despite this, the languages of Sulawesi may be key to understanding important linguistic issues in the region, such as the nature and development of Austronesian voice, and the prehistory of Indonesia. In partnership with local organizations and community leaders, recordings were made of native speakers in two language communities of Sulawesi. Materials to be archived in Kaipuleohone Language Archive.