This monograph is a collection of selected papers on Oceanic languages. For the first time, aspects of the morphology and syntax of Oceanic languages such as the encoding of sentence types, the structure of the noun phrase, noun incorporation, constituent order, and ergative vs. accusative alignment are discussed from a comparative point of view, thus drawing attention to genetic, areal and language-specific features. The individual papers are based on the field work of the authors on lesser-described and endangered languages and are basically descriptive studies. At the same time they also explore the theoretical implications of the data presented and analyzed, as well as the historical development of certain morpho-syntactic phenomena, without basing these explorations on a single theoretical framework. The book provides new insights into the morphosyntactic structures of Oceanic languages and is of interest primarily for linguists working on Austronesian, in particular Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian languages, but also for typologists and linguists working on language change.

This book deals with the syntax of the free word order phenomenon (scrambling) in a wide range of languages - in particular, German, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Tongan, and Turkish - in some of which the phenomenon was previously unstudied. In the past, the syntax of free word order phenomena has been studied intensively with respect to its A- and A'-movement properties and in connection with its semantic (undoing) effects. The different articles in this volume offer new ways of analyzing free word order under (i) minimalist assumptions, (ii) concerning the typology of scrambling languages, (iii) with respect to the question of how it is acquired by children, (iv) in connection with its relatedness to information structural factors, and (v) with respect to its consequences for a highly elaborated sentence structure of the IP/VP domain. The articles that focus mainly on the emprical aspects of free word order phenomena deal with the properties and proper analysis of rightwards scrambling in Turkish, with the A-/A'-nature and triggers for VSO-VOS alternations in Tongan, as well as with left-branch extractions and NP-Split in Slavic and its consequences for a typology of scrambling languages. The articles that focus on theoretical aspects of scrambling deal with questions concerning the motivatation of a derivation with scrambling in a free word order language, such as whether scrambling has to be analyzed as topicalization or focus movement. Or assuming that scrambling is feature-driven, how the technical details of this analysis are implemented in the grammar to avoid unwarranted derivations, for example, derivations with string-vacuous scrambling. A further important question that is addressed is when scrambling is acquired in the development of the grammar, and what the consequences are for the timing of the acquisition of A- and A'-movement properties. This volume will be most relevant to researchers and advanced students interested in generative syntax, as well as typologists working on German, Japanese, Slavic, Turkish, Dravidian and Austronesian languages. We regret that due to a layout error the title of Miyagawa's article on "EPP and semantically vacuous scrambling" is misrepresented in the printed version of the book. You can download the article with the corrected title here.

Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages is a collection of papers devoted to the syntactic analysis of modification and extraction strategies in Austronesian languages such as Kavalan, Malagasy, Niuean, Seediq, and Tagalog. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, it elucidates the categorial and phrase structural status as well as the scopal behavior of sentence-level adverbs, ordering constraints on adjectival modifiers, and the nature of unbounded dependencies in interaction with Philippine-type voice systems. Guglielmo Cinque's universal ordering hypothesis for adverbs and current work on remnant movement serve as theoretical points of reference. More particularly the book contains an analysis of lower VP-adverbs in Kavalan as serial verbs (Chang), a defense of two types of adverbial heads in Seediq (Holmer), an account of possible DP-internal serializations in Niuean in terms of remnant movement (Kahnemuyipour Massam), a plea for relative, scope-based adverb ordering in Tagalog (Kaufman), a clefting approach to unbounded dependencies in Malagasy (Potsdam), a critical assessment of constraints on remnant movement as applied to adverb orderings in Malagasy (Thiersch), and an analysis of the Malagasy voice system on the basis of clitic left-dislocation (Travis). The editors' introduction undertakes a critical survey of the relevant empirical and theoretical background. A substantial part of the empirical facts are presented here for the first time, and the book will inspire additional systematic investigation of the often neglected aspects of modificational strategies in Austronesian languages. The book will be of value to linguists interested in contemporary syntactic analysis and to everyone seeking a deeper understanding of the formal properties of Austronesian.