This volume grew out of the Austroasiatic Workshop on Comparative Syntax held September 5–7, 2016, at the Myanmar Center, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. The workshop was conceived as a sister event to the International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics (ICAAL), which is not held every year. At the 2015 ICAAL, held in Siem Reap (Cambodia), it was decided that it would be appropriate to organise working meetings on off-years, at which participants could present and discuss work tackling specific themes of programmatic and topical importance. This is in contrast to the open sessions of the ICAAL, at which individual scholars present their talks according to their personal priorities, without necessary reference to a common theme.
The workshop was held in Chiang Mai with financial support of the Max Planck Institute Jena (Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution) and the University of Zurich (Department of Comparative Linguistics) in cooperation with Chiang Mai University (Myanmar Center). This generous support facilitated participation of some 16 scholars plus attendance by various local staff and students. Participants came from Australia, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, USA, and included scholars outside of Austroasiatic studies who have expertise in areal and typological linguistics and syntax, as well as history. This proved to be a successful strategy, allowing discussions to be grounded in wider typological and historical context, in addition to Austroasiatic etymological and descriptive aspects, generating lively and productive discussion.
The plan for the meeting arose when the question of Austroasiatic historical syntax was raised in Siam Reap in the context of Jenny’s (2015) groundbreaking chapter presenting evidence that VS/VAP word order may have been dominant in proto-Austroasiatic clauses. The novelty and audacity of the claim reminded us all just how much syntactic studies have been absent from, or poorly handled, in Austroasiatic language descriptions, and attention was galvanised around the prospects of integrating syntax into the investigation of Austroasiatic language history, including reconstructing syntactic structures of the proto-language.
The chapters that emerged, and were subsequently brought together for this volume, demonstrate a variety of investigations into syntactic change, including reconstruction of word order at phrasal and clausal levels, syntactic dependencies, and grammaticalizations, and motivations in terms of internal dynamics and areal contexts. The authors use different methodologies in their approach to the task of explaining the syntactic diversity of the AA family.