construction grammar – Christina L. Truong

Western Austronesian applicative constructions: Function and typological approaches

Christina L. Truong

Ph.D. Dissertation

This dissertation investigates applicatives in the western Austronesian languages of Indonesia,
Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore—that is, West Nusantara—and adjacent areas of the Philippines
and mainland Southeast Asia. As used in this study, an applicative construction (AC) is a kind of
clausal construction in which overt morphology on the verbal complex coincides with the selection of a peripheral semantic role (e.g. beneficiary, goal, instrument) as a core clausal argument.
In many of these languages, applicative alternations signaled by such verbal morphology—as
well as causative, aspectual, and semantic alternations signaled by the same morphemes—shape
and color the use of verbal predicates throughout the entire language.

A primary goal of the study is to understand the applicative systems of West Nusantara in
typological context, but also on their own terms, in the context of the diachronic and synchronic
systems in which they developed and are used. Special attention is also given to broadening the
description and cross-linguistic comparison of West Nusantara ACs and their functions, properties, and usage.

Lexical semantics and the constructional meaning of Western Indonesian applicatives

Christina L. Truong & Bradley McDonnell
Presentation at APLL 14, 9–11 June, 2022

In this presentation, we compare the different functions of applicative morphemes (AMs) across the lexicons of a sample of four western Indonesian languages in order to understand the influence of lexical semantics on their distribution. To show how semantic and syntactic effects of AMs pattern, we adopt the treatment of AM-marked clausal constructions as pairings of form (morphological content and syntactic
structure) and meaning (semantic content and structure) (see Goldberg 1995).

We address the following research questions: Do AM-marked constructions have an identifiable set of core meanings? How are these meanings distributed across languages of western Indonesia and their
lexicons? Using data from original fieldwork, published descriptions, corpora and lexical
resources, we compare unmarked and AM-marked constructions across a common set of
roots based on the 80 lexical meanings on the Leipzig Valency Classes Project Questionnaire
(Malchukov & Comrie 2015).

On the basis of patterns identified, we propose an inventory of core constructional
meanings marked with AMs and show how languages of the sample differ with respect to this
inventory. For example, benefactive applicative constructions vary in productivity, with the
Sundanese benefactives being compatible with far more lexical bases than the
others. Across languages, the benefactive construction is most commonly centered around
lexemes that entail acquisition, production or processing of material objects. In languages
with more productive benefactive constructions, many additionally compatible verbs entail a
change of state.

Our results reinforce previous findings that syntactic categories, such as transitivity of the base or the unergative/unaccusative distinction, do not adequately explain the distribution of the functions of AMs across the lexicon (see Kroeger 2007). The study also systematically expands identification of types of semantic information that speakers are likely sensitive to in producing and interpreting verbal constructions formed with these affixes, suggesting pathways along which lexicalization of such constructions has occurred.

Slides available here.

Semantic meaning and the representation of
Indonesian applicative constructions

Christina L. Truong
Presentation at SEALS 31, 18–20 May, 2022

In this paper, I show that the argument structure of base verbs and components of lexical meaning
together influence compatibility of bases with functions of applicative suffixes. For example, both
transitive verbs of caused motion that select a theme argument, e.g. mengambil ‘take’, membawa ‘carry’,
and transitive verbs of creation that select a ‘product’ argument, e.g. memasak ‘cook’, menjahit ‘sew,’ are
compatible with the benefactive applicative –kan construction, as shown below. However there are some
semantic differences in resulting constructions.

Some other transitive verbs are entirely incompatible with benefactive –kan, including verbs of
perception, e.g. there is no verb *menontonkan meaning ‘to watch something for someone’. Accordingly,
I argue for the incorporation of lexical meaning into representations of applicative constructions, and
propose ways to do so, using corpus data representing one million Indonesian sentences and drawing on construction grammar and frame semantics (Goldberg 1995, Perek & Patten 2019, Goldhahn et al. 2012).

Slides available here.