This volume presents the most wide-ranging treatment available today of the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Southeast Asia and their outliers, a group of more than 800 languages belonging to the wider Austronesian family. It brings together leading scholars and junior researchers to offer a comprehensive account of the historical relations, typological diversity, and varied sociolinguistic issues that characterize this group of languages, including current debates in their prehistories and descriptive priorities for future study. The book is divided into four parts. Part I deals with historical linguistics, including discussion of human genetics, archaeology, and cultural history. Chapters in Part II explore language contact between Malayo-Polynesian and unrelated languages, as well as sociolinguistic issues such as multilingualism, language policy, and language endangerment. Part III provides detailed overviews of the different groupings of Malayo-Polynesian languages, while Part IV offers in-depth studies of important typological features across the whole linguistic area. The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages of Southeast Asia will be an essential reference for students and researchers specializing in Austronesian languages and for typologists and comparative linguists more broadly.

Finishing this book was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. It took far too long from original idea to page proofs and suffered from being relegated to small corners of my life. It was very rarely on the front burner. Since I started working on this topic in 1991, there has been a lot of interesting work done on the areas of the articulation of VP, phrase structure mirroring event structure, the use of functional categories to represent Aktionsart, and many other areas that the research presented here touches on. The hardest thing about doing a project of this size is to accept that not everyone’s ideas can be addressed and not all new research can be incorporated. The only way that I have found it possible to let this book go to press is to reread the Preface to Events in the Semantics of English by Terence Parsons where he writes, ‘‘The goal of this book is neither completeness nor complete accuracy; it is to get some interesting proposals into the public arena for others to criticize, develop, and build on. ’’ My aim in this book is to make connections between various accounts of various constructions in various languages at the risk of treating each of these too lightly. I am grateful to too many people to thank them individually.