Austronesian undressed : how and why languages become isolating / edited by David Gil, Antoinette Schapper.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction / David Gil and Antoinette Schapper -- What does it mean to be an isolating language? The case of Riau Indonesian / David Gil -- The loss of affixation in Cham : contact, internal drift and the limits of linguistic history / Marc Brunelle -- Dual heritage : the story of Riau Indonesian and its relatives / David Gil -- Voice and bare verbs in colloquial Minangkabau / Sophie Crouch -- Javanese undressed : 'peripheral' dialects in typological perspective / Thomas J. Conners -- Are the Central Flores languages really typologically unusual? / Alexander Elias -- From Lamaholot to Alorese : morphological loss in adult language contact / Marian Klamer -- Double agent, double cross? Or how a suffix changes nature in an isolating language : dór in Tetun Dili / Catharina Williams-van Klinken and John Hajek -- The origins of isolating word structure in eastern Timor / Antoinette Schapper -- Becoming Austronesian : mechanisms of language dispersal across southern Island Southeast Asia and the collapse of Austronesian morphosyntax / Mark Donohue and Tim Denham -- Concluding reflections / John McWhorter.

"Many Austronesian languages exhibit isolating word structure. This volume offers a series of investigations into these languages, which are found in an "isolating crescent" extending from Mainland Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago and into western New Guinea. Some of the languages examined in this volume include Cham, Minangkabau, colloquial Malay/Indonesian and Javanese, Lio, Alorese, and Tetun Dili. The main purpose of this volume is to address the general question of how and why languages become isolating, by examination of a number of competing hypotheses. While some view morphological loss as a natural process, others argue that the development of isolating word structure is typically driven by language contact through various mechanisms such as creolization, metatypy, and Sprachbund effects. This volume should be of interest not only to Austronesianists and historians of Insular Southeast Asia, but also to grammarians, typologists, historical linguists, creolists, and specialists in language contact"--

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