Alexander D. Smith
List of John Benjamins publications in which Alexander D. Smith is involved.
2026 Bornean passives in comparative perspective New Insights into Theoretical Syntax from Asian Languages: Studies in honor of C.-T. James Huang, Simpson, Andrew (ed.), pp. 322–347 | Chapter
This paper investigates three types of passives in Lebo’ Vo’, an endangered Kenyah language of northern Borneo (Austronesian), and discusses their implications for linguistic theory and syntactic typology. Passives in Lebo’ Vo’ involve a preverbal analytic marker, with an agent expressed… read more
2026 Modeling sound change in a dialectically heterogeneous community: The case of Rhotacism in central Borneo Journal of Historical Linguistics: Online-First Articles | Article
Vertical and horizontal models of language relatedness, such as tree models and wave models, approach language change from two fundamentally different perspectives. Vertical models capture the diachronic nature of language differentiation but do not offer a satisfactory way to show diffusion… read more
2025 Late Malayo-Polynesian: A new model of Austronesian linguistic relations Diachronica 42:5, pp. 646–698 | Article
Models of higher-order Austronesian linguistic relations have traditionally involved the grouping of languages into large higher-order subgroups. In the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, that tradition has led to the creation of subgroups covering great geographical distances all modeled as descending… read more
2025 Reevaluating two schwa-initial reconstructions in Proto‑ and Pre‑Proto‑Austronesian numerals with some help from Kra‑Dai Language and Linguistics 26:4, pp. 673–694 | Article
Proto-Austronesian numeral reconstruction typically includes the reconstructions *əsa ‘one’ and *ənəm ‘six’. These lexemes are noteworthy because they contain the only examples of schwa in word-initial position in a Proto-Austronesian reconstruction as presented in the Austronesian Comparative… read more
2023 Reconstructing non-contrastive stress in Austronesian and the role of the mora in stress shift, gemination and vowel shift Diachronica 40:1, pp. 111–152 | Article
Competing schools of thought on the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian stress contend that primary stress was either regular (falling on the penultimate syllable with possible phonetic conditions that triggered stress shift to the final syllable) or lexical (falling unpredictably either on the… read more
2022 Environmental factors affect the evolution of linguistic subgroups in Borneo Diachronica 39:2, pp. 193–225 | Article
This study investigates the relatedness and history of the Austronesian languages of Borneo, which is the third largest island in the world and home to significant linguistic diversity. We apply Bayesian phylogenetic dating methods to lexical cognate data based on four historical calibration… read more