Christina L. Truong & Bradley J. McDonnell
Presentation at SLE 2020, 26 August – 1 September 2020
The verbal affixes which form applicative constructions in western Indonesian languages are extremely polyfunctional, but this fact is not widely discussed nor well-accounted for. In this paper, we survey the functions of applicative affixes in eight western Indonesian languages. We pay close attention to the varied syntactic properties and semantic nuances of apparent applicative constructions. We demonstrate that the non-prototypical functions are both prevalent in individual languages and broadly distributed across languages of the region.
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