Word Classes in Austronesian Languages

Abstract

Abstract This chapter describes lexicological concepts and morphological and syntactic diagnostics that are used for the classification of content words in Austronesian linguistics. The Austronesian language family counts approximately 1,200 languages which are mainly spoken in South-East Asia and the Pacific islands. With respect to noun–verb distinctions, there are languages in which nouns and verbs differ morphologically and syntactically, while others like Tagalog distinguish nouns and verbs only morphologically, but not syntactically. A third type of language does not divide all content words into distinct classes, but only has some morphological subclasses that are marked by affixes, whereas the unmarked words are flexible or only distinguished by the modifiers they occur with. Prototypical property words may form a word class of their own, be affiliated with either the class of nouns or the class of verbs, or form subclasses of both the class of nouns and the class of verbs.