Handbook of Formosan Languages Online: The Indigenous Languages of Taiwan

In an attempt to draw attention toward the decline of the indigenous languages of Taiwan and to reverse the critical shift toward Mandarin Chinese, the dominant language, this chapter evaluates the effectiveness of current indigenous-language policy measures and implementations based on the the policy-to-outcome path for minority languages framework and examines both the expected and the actual outcomes of policy decisions. It also offers recommendations for improving indigenous-language policy planning in Taiwan. 41.1 IntroductionIt is essential to evaluate the effe…

In Formosan languages, existential, possessive and locative clauses are headed by a verb which usually means ‘exist’ and less commonly ‘have’. The existential, possessive and/or locative predicates commonly constitute a special verb class, with specific morphological formation: most are formed with the locative i which attaches to a deictic; some can be marked for voice; others have evolved into aspectual markers. Some languages exhibit two have-structures, the first denoting the existence of the possessed entity and the second referring to inalienable or inherent possession. 2…

This chapter discusses the contribution of Formosan languages to models of sentence processing by first reviewing past psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on Formosan languages and then demonstrating why such contributions are crucial to models of language processing. The challenges that can be encountered when conducting psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on Formosan languages are also discussed along with the insights that typologically different languages like Formo…