Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University
The Austronesian family includes over a thousand languages, making it one of the largest language families in the world. The family extends from Taiwan and mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the coast of the island of New Guinea to most of the islands of the Pacific and Madagascar.
Clarity of style and breadth of coverage make this work a uniquely valuable treatment of the extensive Austronesian language family. This work will serve the needs of linguists, anthropologists, historians, and other interested readers for a long time to come. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the definitive survey of Austronesian.
The volume begins with a detailed table of contents and includes several maps as well as numerous tables and figures, all of which contribute to making this work an easy-to-use encyclopedia of one of the world’s major language families. Ch. 1, ‘The Austronesian world’ (1–28), introduces the geographical setting of the Austronesian languages. Various topics include physical anthropology, social and cultural background, contacts with the wider world, and the archaeological evidence for the pre-historical migrations that spread Austronesian languages. Ch. 2, ‘A bird’s eye view of the Austronesian language family’ (29–117), provides an overview of the language family. The chapter is divided into sections covering the internal structure of the family, the complicated problem of delineating language from dialect, national languages and lingua francas, language distribution by geographical area, language size, and selected typological features.
Ch. 3, ‘Language in society’ (118–61), deals with speech register and language contact (borrowing, linguistic areas, code-switching, pidginization and creolization, and determinates of language size). Of cultural and sociological interest is the summary of various systems of socially-based speech levels and respect vocabulary. In addition to the well-known case of Javanese, similar socially-based phenomena are discussed in Pohnpeian (Micronesian) and in the Polynesian languages Samoan and Tongan (118–29). Ch. 4, ‘Sound systems’ (162–266), presents selected phoneme inventories organized by geographical area. The following subsections deal with ‘morpheme structures (phonotactics)’ and ‘phonological processes’.
Ch. 5, ‘The lexicon’ (267–342), is a wide-ranging treatment of word classes, semantics, and semantic change. Numeral systems, color terms, and pronoun systems are summarized in detail for various languages and subgroups. Ch. 6, ‘Morphology’ (342–430), includes such features as affixation and reduplication in selected languages. B points out that the complex patterns of verbal affixation in many Austronesian languages (especially in ‘Philippine-type’ languages) cannot be easily separated from syntactic issues such as participant roles and tense and aspect.
Ch. 7, ‘Syntax’ (431–505), attempts to present some of the broad range of typologically varied syntactic patterns. A problem that B raises here is how to present as neutrally as possible the results of research based on different theoretical approaches. His solution is generally to ignore syntactic issues where ‘theory-bound work’ has been prominent, including ‘complex sentences, relativisation, extraction, and clitics, to name a few’ (431). Other topics, however, are dealt with in some detail: voice systems, case marking, word order, negation, possession, word classes, directionals, imperatives, and questions.
Ch. 8, ‘Reconstruction’ (506–93), presents an overview of work in reconstructing the proto-language and the establishment of a phoneme system that accounts for subsequent developments in the family and its subgroups. Ch. 9, ‘Sound change’ (594–680), covers the range of sound changes in language and their presence in the various languages of the family. It is of course impossible to give more than a cursory coverage of the histories of individual languages, so instead the chapter is organized around such topics as ‘internal sound change,’ ‘normal sound change,’ ‘bizarre sound change,’ ‘quantitative aspects of sound change,’ ‘the Regularity Hypothesis,’ and ‘drift.’
Ch. 10, ‘Classification’ (681–746), deals with the general issue of establishing genetic relationships between languages, various proposals of genetic relationships of Austronesian with other language families, subgroupings within Austronesian, and the relationship of internal genetic relationships to proposed migration histories. Ch. 11, ‘The world of Austronesian scholarship’ (747–63), discusses the large scholarly community involved with the study of the Austronesian family, major research centers, conferences over the past few decades, leading periodicals, and major bibliographies. There is a brief discussion of fifteen other language families in comparison with Austronesian, with notes on the most important scholarship associated with each family. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography and a sparse index of subjects with virtually no languages listed.