Perspectives on Information Structure in Austronesian Languages ed. by Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara, and Atsuko Utsumi (review)

This book is a collection of papers that emerged from a series of workshops on information structure in Austronesian languages organized by the second and third editors of this volume and held at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. As might be imagined from the genesis of the volume, its contents vary in quality, from of rather middling interest and execution to real gems that will repay dividends to anyone from a close reading. Information structure is a term introduced by Halliday (1967), building on work in the Prague School of Linguistics, and, from being a largely neglected area of syntactic study, it has emerged to become a hot topic in the past couple of decades, starting from Lambrecht's (1994) classic monograph to the survey volume of Erteschik-Shir (2007) and to the detailed handbooks of Féry and Ishihara (2016) and Zimmermann and Féry (2010). This volume is the first extensive treatment of the topic in Austronesian languages.

The book is divided into three sections: the first dealing with the marking of information structure status on noun phrases (NPs); the second with how information structure affects syntax, particularly word order; and the third with the marking of information structure by prosodic contours. Many languages use multiple cues to indicate information structure; for example, English uses both word order—that is, focal information tends to come later in a sentence: What did John eat? John ate rice versus *Rice was eaten by John—and prosodic contours, so that a focused NP at the beginning of a sentence is marked by a high falling pitch: Who saw Bill? Jòhn saw Bill.

The first paper in the collection by Rik de Busser employs Halliday and Hasan's (1976) study of how cohesion is established in English texts to study cohesive strategies in two text types in Bunun, a language of Taiwan, namely traditional oral narratives and narratives drawn from the Bunun translation of the Bible. Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) had suggested that cohesive ties in texts could vary according to genre types, here oral versus written narratives, but de Busser finds exactly the opposite. In spite of evident wide grammatical differences between the two text types, he finds that the referential cohesive strategies are largely similar. The only apparent skewing, though largely minor, is that the oral narratives tend to employ spatial and temporal deictic forms more, almost certainly a function of their present oral setting and therefore need to set spatial and temporal parameters for the events narrated, while the biblical texts introduce more entities per sentence through referring expressions. However, this clearly follows from their written modality, as it is well known that written texts permit higher lexical density due to the reader's ability to control processing speed.

The next paper by Kratochvil, Ismail, and Hamzah discusses how a speaker's epistemic stance informs how information structure in discourse is constructed in Singaporean Malay. They argue that epistemic stance is the basis of information structure categories like old, new, or given. The speaker's epistemic stance is categorized as "familiar," with a stronger cognitive or emotional connection, versus "unfamiliar," a neutral tone. Humans and animate referents are commonly "familiar," and inanimate referents, unfamiliar. Participants categorized as "familiar" tend to be realized as proper names initially in a text and as truncated realizations like pronouns or even zero as the text goes on, while "unfamiliar" participants are expressed as full NPs and continue to be realized as such as the text unfolds. A "familiar" stance then tends to simplify the expression of referents, while an "unfamiliar" one motivates more elaborated expressions. However, "familiar" participants often are realized by different expressions providing varying perspectives on their referents for...