Book publication by Christina Truong

Christina Truong (PhD., 2024) just published her new book, Western Austronesian Applicative Constructions, from the Endangered and Lesser-Studied Languages and Dialects series of the Brill publishing. This open access series was established through a collaboration among the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Japan, the Department of Linguistics at UHM, and the Brill Publishing. Christina’s book is available for downloading here. The book is based on her 2024 UHM dissertation, which has been updated and revised to include newly available data in a wider range of languages and highlight new insights into geographic and diachronic patterns in the data presented. Here is the description of the book from Brill’s webpage: 

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 ‘canonical’ patterns for applicatives. This book adopts a construction-based, typologically-grounded approach, treating applicatives as pairings of form and meaning. Data from 85 languages are 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. 

Congratulations, Christina!