The book describes the Makasar language of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, drawing heavily on three centuries of literary sources. Makasarese is notable as head–marking and ergative/absolutive in alignment, and its large number of geminate and pre–glottalised consonants.
This volume presents the most wide-ranging treatment available today of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and varied sociolinguistic issues that characterize this group of languages, including current debates in their prehistories and descriptive priorities for future study. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with historical linguistics, including discussion of human genetics, archaeology, and cultural history. Chapters in Part II explore language contact between Malayo-Polynesian and unrelated languages, as well as sociolinguistic issues such as multilingualism, language policy, and language endangerment. Part III provides detailed overviews of the different groupings of Malayo-Polynesian languages, while Part IV offers in-depth studies of important typological features across the whole linguistic area. The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia will be an essential reference for students and researchers specializing in Austronesian languages and for typologists and comparative linguists more broadly.
This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).
This book aims at investigating discourse phenomena (i.e., linguistic elements and constructions that help to manage the organization, flow, and outcome of communication) from a typological and cross-linguistic perspective. Although it is a well-established idea in functional-typological approaches that grammar is shaped by discourse use, systematic typological cross-linguistic investigations on discourse phenomena are relatively rare. This volume aims at bridging this gap, by integrating different linguistic subfields, such as discourse analysis, pragmatics, and typology. The contributions, both theoretically and empirically oriented, focus on a broad variety of discourse phenomena (ranging from discourse markers to discourse function of grammatical markers, to strategies that manage the discourse and information flow) while adopting a typological perspective and considering typologically distant languages.
This English > Makasar lexicon is based on the 200+ language 8,000 entry World Languages Dictionary CD of 2007 which was subsequently lodged in national libraries across the world. The corresponding Chinese lexicon has a vocabulary of 2,429 characters, 95% of which are in the primary group of 3,500 general standard Chinese characters issued by China's Ministry of Education in 2013.
The Bugis Chronicle of Bone is a masterwork in the historiographical tradition of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. Written in the late seventeenth century for a very specific political purpose, it describes the steady growth of the kingdom of Bone from the fourteenth century onwards. The local conquests of the fifteenth century, closely linked to agricultural expansion, give way to the long conflict with the Makasar state of Gowa in the sixteenth century. Forced Islamisation in 1611 is dealt with in detail, leading finally to first contact with the Dutch East India Company in 1667. This edition presents a diplomatic version of the best Bugis text, together with the first full English translation and an extensive introduction covering the philological approach to the edition, as well as the historical and cultural significance of the work. A structure based on the reigns of successive rulers allows for stories about the circumstances of each ruler and, particularly, the often dramatic processes and politics of succession. The chronicle is a rich source for historians and anthropologists seeking to understand societies beyond Europe. It provides a window on to this Austronesian-speaking society before the impact of significant external influences. This is history from within, covering more than three centuries.