Starosta, StanleyPawley, AndrewReid, Lawrence A.2014-05-072014-05-072009Stanley Starosta, Andrew Pawley and Reid, Lawrence. "The Evolution of Focus in Austronesian (1981)." In Formosan Linguistics: Stanley Starosta's Contributions, vol. 2, edited by Elizabeth Zeitoun, 329-481. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series C6. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2009.http://hdl.handle.net/10125/33042The present paper attempts to account for the evolution of Western Austronesian focus constructions by showing that they evolved as a result of the reinterpretation of nominalized equational constructions by analogy with functionally equivalent verbal constructions, i.e., *-en, *ni-/-in-, *-ana, *iSi-, and possibly *mu-/-um- were all noun-deriving affixes in PAN that their verbal focus usages in the Formosan and Philippine languages represent a secondary development.154 pagesPhilippine-type languagesSyntactic changeVoice-markingAustronesian languagesBook Chapter