typology – Christina L. Truong

Towards a typology of pseudo antipassives in Western Austronesian languages

Christina L. Truong & Victoria Chen

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

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.

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

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

Non-Malayic Languages of Sumatra and the Barrier Islands

Bradley McDonnell & Christina L. Truong

Book chapter in The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia edited by Alexander Adelaar and Antoinette Schapper

Publisher link to chapter

This chapter provides a typological overview of the Non-Malayic languages of Sumatra and the Barrier islands off of the west coast of Sumatra. This group of languages is diverse, sharing few typological features that are not a result of their shared Austronesian inheritance. The chapter includes discussions of typological phenomena of broad relevance in the domains of phonology (segmental inventories, stress, reduplication, phonological processes) and morphosyntax (case, agreement, grammatical relations, word order, tense, aspect, mood, and noun phrase structure). It also critically discusses less common typological features, such as the presence of post-ploded nasals in several languages, consonant mutation of nominals in Nias, and symmetrical voice as an important typological parameter for these languages. Finally, the chapter suggests priorities and future direction for the Non-Malayic languages of Sumatra and the Barrier Islands.

On the rise of applicatives in West Nusantara

Christina L. Truong

Themed panel presentation at the 16th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics

Slides here.

This study examines the distribution of applicative constructions in Malayo-Polynesian languages of West Nusantara, and the relationships between applicatives, geographic location, genetic affiliation, and other typological features of language. Eighty-five languages were sampled across genetic groupings indigenous to West Nusantara (Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia west of Lombok) by geographic subregion. Using existing descriptive, lexical, and pedagogical resources, each language was evaluated for the presence of applicative constructions in which morphological marking on the predicate coincides with selection of a peripheral semantic role as a core argument (Peterson 2007). Data on structural properties, including word order, alignment, voice system, and case marking, and semantic and syntactic properties of the applicative constructions were also compiled. Analysis was conducted using geospatial mapping, and statistical tests for non-random association (Pearson’s exact tests) and evaluation of possible classification trees (Random Forest algorithm, see Breiman 2001).

The results indicate that applicative constructions distinct from major voice alternations are an areal feature of West Nusantara associated with the breakdown of Philippine-type voice. Furthermore, genetic affiliation and geographic subregion are strongly predictive of the presence or absence of applicatives, with contact-induced change being implicated for the lack of applicatives in most of Borneo and mainland Southeast Asia. The presence of applicatives otherwise cuts across types of voice system (e.g. symmetrical, asymmetrical), alignment (e.g. ergative, accusative, mixed), word order (e.g. verb-initial, verb-medial) and case marking (e.g. case marking particles, pronominal distinctions, no case marking). This cast doubts on the usefulness of a proposed Indonesian-type of western Austronesian languages associated with applicatives (see Himmelmann 2005). Some features of applicative constructions are quite stable, including the distribution of beneficiary/instrument/theme-selecting functions and locative/goal-selecting functions across separate morphemes. This distribution and other evidence from remnant constructions and historical comparative studies point to West Nusantara applicative constructions being developed from earlier LV and CV Philippine-type voice constructions.

Western Austronesian applicative constructions: Typological and functional approaches

Christina L. Truong

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Ph.D. Dissertation

Download manuscript here

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.

Neglected functions of western Indonesian applicative morphology

Christina L. Truong & Bradley McDonnell (2022)

In Sara Pacchiarotti and Fernando Zuñiga (eds.), Applicative morphology: Neglected syntactic and non-syntactic functions (Trends in Linguistics 373), 405-436. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110777949.

Many of the Austronesian languages of western Indonesia make use of applicative morphology that licenses a core argument with a peripheral semantic role, such as a location, beneficiary, goal, or instrument. However, the same morphology that forms these prototypical applicative constructions is consistently polyfunctional across the languages of western Indonesia. A number of these functions fall outside of what is often considered prototypical of applicatives, resulting in a diversity of syntactic, semantic, and even pragmatic effects. In this chapter, we describe the diversity of functions of applicative suffixes in nine western Indonesian languages that are geographically dispersed across the region and represent different subgroups, highlighting “neglected” functions that are often not discussed in the literature on applicatives. In doing so, we show that there is considerable overlap between forms, functions, and morphosyntactic properties across these languages, but despite these similarities, variation among and within applicative constructions in these languages presents a complex synchronic and diachronic picture.

The non-Malayic languages of Sumatra and the Barrier Islands

Bradley J. McDonnell & Christina L. Truong

To appear in Adelaar, Alexander and Antoinette Schapper (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia (Oxford Guides to the World’s Languages). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Publisher link: Forthcoming, May 2023.

In this chapter, we present a typological overview of the non-Malayic Malayo-Polynesian languages of Sumatra and the Barrier Islands (NMLS). These languages are extremely diverse. They share few typological features other than those due to their shared Austronesian inheritance, their general geographic position, and the contact they have all had with Malayic languages. Section 1 describes the consonant and vowel inventories, stress, and phonological processes. Section 2 presents an overview of common affixes and morphological processes in the languages. Section 3 covers basic syntactic properties including grammatical relations, case, agreement, word order, and noun phrase structure. Section 4 describes some aspects of tense, aspect, modality, and mood in NMLS. Section 5 summarizes the chapter and describes directions for further research including the need for more documentation and description of NMLS. The principal languages we draw on for our typological generalizations and examples include: Acehnese, Gayo, Karo Batak, Toba Batak, Simeulue, Sikule, Nias, Mentawai, Enggano Rejang, Nasal, and Lampung.