Article published in:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 18:4 (2017) ► pp. 577–621

The pitfalls of negative evidence

‘Nuclear Austronesian’, ‘Ergative Austronesian’, and their progeny

| University of Hawai‘i
| University of Hawai‘i
Beginning with publications in the early 1980s there have been attempts to use syntactic data to determine the highest-order subgroups of Austronesian. These efforts fall into two categories: those which claim that the voice affixes of Philippine-type languages originally had exclusively nominalizing functions, and those which claim that the affixes themselves were innovated after the separation of Rukai from the ancestor of all other Austronesian languages. Although these ideas lay dormant for some years, recently both have been revived in renewed efforts to show that the Austronesian family tree is not ‘rake-like’ in its highest nodes, but shows extensive embedding of subgroups that can be justified by successive layers of syntactic innovations. This paper questions the methodological soundness of both types of arguments on the grounds that they appeal to negative evidence, and logically any such appeal can do no better than reach an inference of indeterminate status rather than the positive conclusions that have been proposed.
Keywords: subgrouping, negative evidence, Nuclear Austronesian hypothesis, Ergative Austronesian hypothesis
Article outline
  • 1.The nature of scientific arguments
  • 2.The morphosyntax-based arguments for Austronesian higher-order subgrouping
  • 3.Malayo-Polynesian as a test case
    • 3.1The history of Malayo-Polynesian, 1: The Nuclear Austronesian hypothesis
      • 3.1.1Implications for Puyuma
    • 3.2The history of Malayo-Polynesian, 2: The Ergative Austronesian hypothesis
      • 3.2.1The temporal asymmetry of gains and losses
  • 4.*-an before *-en? Implications of the morphosyntax-based subgroupings for Austronesian historical morphology
    • 4.1Against *-en as a post-PAn innovation
      • 4.1.1Patient nominalization in Puyuma: Tamalakaw and Katripul vs. Nanwang
      • 4.1.2Tamalakaw and Katripul -en vs. Nanwang -an
    • 4.2Rukai as a case of extensive loss: Budai Rukai <in>√-Ø
    • 4.3Saaroa patient nominalization and its implications for the NAn hypothesis
    • 4.4An East Formosan parallel: Amis -en vs. Kavalan -an
    • 4.5Summary
  • 5.Conclusion and implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 10 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.18.4.02blu
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The pitfalls of negative evidence
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Blust, Robert
2019. The Austronesian Homeland and Dispersal. Annual Review of Linguistics 5:1 ► pp. 417 ff. Crossref logo

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