Austronesian Root Theory: An essay on the limits of morphology
Robert Blust
[Studies in Language Companion Series, 19] 1988. xi, 190 pp.
Robert Blust
List of John Benjamins publications for which Robert Blust plays a role.
Title
Subjects Austronesian languages | Morphology | Theoretical linguistics
2022 The Neogrammarian hypothesis and pandemic irregularity: Take two Journal of Historical Linguistics 12:2, pp. 167–193 | Article
At least three types of sound change (prenasalization of obstruents, lenition of obstruents, conversion of labial consonants to the corresponding labiovelars) are widespread in the Austronesian language family as sporadic innovations. What marks these off as different from more familiar types of… read more
2018 Chapter 3. Historical linguistics in the raw: My life as diachronic fieldworker Word Hunters: Field linguists on fieldwork, Sarvasy, Hannah and Diana Forker (eds.), pp. 29–43 | Chapter
2017 Odd conditions: Context-sensitive sound change in unexpected contexts Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:3, pp. 322–371 | Article
Since the 19th century linguists have expected to find conditioned sound changes in environments that make phonetic sense: consonants palatalize adjacent to front vowels, back vowels front if a front vowel occurs in the next syllable, stops voice between voiced segments, and so forth. Most… read more
2017 The Lowland Kenyah posterior implosives: A typological reversal Language and Linguistics 18:2, pp. 177–200 | Article
The Kenyah languages of central Borneo form a distinct unit within the North Sarawak group of Austronesian languages. In northern Sarawak there is a well-defined contrast between types that have been called ‘Highland Kenyah’ and ‘Lowland Kenyah’. A key difference between these sets of… read more
2017 The pitfalls of negative evidence: ‘Nuclear Austronesian’, ‘Ergative Austronesian’, and their progeny Language and Linguistics 18:4, pp. 577–621 | Article
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… read more
2012 Primary split revisited Diachronica 29:2, pp. 129–138 | Article
Textbook treatments generally state that primary split, or split-merger leads to positional neutralization, but has no effect on phoneme inventory. However, if the phonemes affected by a primary split have a defective distribution at the time of the change the result may be loss of contrast, or… read more
2007 22. The prenasalised trills of Manus Language Description, History and Development: Linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley, Siegel, Jeff, John Lynch and Diana Eades (eds.), pp. 297–311 | Article
2005 Must sound change be linguistically motivated? Diachronica 22:2, pp. 219–269 | Article
A number of well-documented sound changes in Austronesian languages do not appear to be either phonetically or phonologically motivated. Although it is possible that some of these changes involved intermediate steps for which we have no direct documentation, the assumption that this was always the… read more
1997 Ablaut in Northwest Borneo Diachronica 14:1, pp. 1–30 | Article
SUMMARY Ablaut, a morphological device familiar to Indo-Europeanists, is extremely rare in the more than 900 Austronesian languages, but is widespread in the languages of northern Sarawak. At least seven languages within this area make extensive use of simple verbal ablaut, and all but two of these… read more
1989 A Note on Semantic Cycles in Historical Change Diachronica 6:2, pp. 297–300 | Miscellaneous
1987 Lexical Reconstruction and Semantic Reconstruction: The Case of Austronesian "House" Words Diachronica 4:1/2, pp. 79–106 | Article
SUMMARY In their book of 1974, Lexical Reconstruction: The case of the Proto-Athapaskan kinship system, Isidore Dyen and David F. Aberle developed a methodology for matching reconstructed morphemes with semantic categories. The promise that their contribution holds out to the linguist and to the… read more