ABSTRACT The primary objective of this project is to produce an Austronesian comparative dictionary with between 5,000 and 5,500 base entries and about 2,000 additional affixed forms. Secondary objectives include the creation of an electronically acessible data-base which can serve a variety of purposes (studies of sound change in particular daughter languages, statistical studies of reconstructed forms, etc.). Data will be drawn from about 120 attested languages, all of which have been used by the PI in past publications. For reasons of time the project will be largely limited to integrating about 220 pages of unpublished pilot study material with various scattered publications and a critical reassessment of the material in Otto Dempwolff, Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes (1938). The published result will contain well over twice the number of entries in Dempwolff (1938) in an up-to-date orthography, a reverse English- Austronesian Index, and the following features which are not found in Dempwolff: 1. affixed forms, 2. an explicit indication of relative time-depth for all etyma, 3. detailed semantic reconstructions, 4. annotations to the reconstructions, 5. an appendix of submorphemic roots. It is anticipated that the results will be of great and lasting value not only to Austronesian specialists, but also to long-range comparativists and to social anthropologists and prehistorians interested in island Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
