Why our use of language is highly creative yet also constrained We use words and phrases
creatively to express ourselves in ever-changing contexts, readily extending language …

Over the past four decades, the nature of western Austronesian voice—typically
subcategorized as Philippine-type and Indonesian-type—has triggered considerable debate …

Over the last decade, there has been a slow but steady accumulation of psycholinguistic
research focusing on typologically diverse languages. In this review, we provide an …

This paper argues for and develops an ergative analysis of Tagalog. Determining whether a
language is ergative or accusative is the result of examining the case marking alignment in …

This book is an in-depth study of the voice systems of Totoli, Balinese, Indonesian, and
Tagalog, which shows that the symmetrical nature of these systems poses a problem to …

The Austronesian languages comprise a vast family with some 1,268 members spanning
half of the globe, from Rapanui (Easter Island) on its Eastern boundary, to Malagasy …

The central claim of the dissertation is that the syntactic distribution of arguments depends
on abstract nominal licensing. All nominals must be (i) assigned a thematic role (Chomsky …

This dissertation investigates the nature of the Philippine-type voice system and two
associated diachronic questions:(i) what is the nature of noun-verb (nominalizer-voice affix) …

I investigate patterns of preverbal fronting in Toba Batak, a predicate-initial Austronesian
language of northern Sumatra. Contrary to the claims of previous work on the language, I …

Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable
constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most …