Structure
It is difficult to make generalizations about the languages that make up a family as diverse as Austronesian. Speaking very broadly, the Austronesian languages can be divided into three groups of languages: Philippine-type languages, Indonesian-type languages and post-Indonesian type (Ross 2002). The first group is characterized by relatively strong verb-initial word order and Philippine-type voice alternations. This phenomenon has frequently been referred to as focus. However, the relevant literature is beginning to avoid this term. Many linguists feel that the phenomenon is better described as voice, and that the terminology creates confusion with more common uses of the word focus within linguistics.
The Austronesian languages tend to use reduplication (repetition of all or part of a word, such as wiki-wiki or agar-agar), and, like many East and Southeast Asian languages, most have highly restrictive phonotactics, with generally small numbers of phonemes and predominantly consonant–vowel syllables.
Read more about this topic: Austronesian Languages
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)