A special meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) is planned for 27-29 March 1998. The theme for AFLA V will be "Perspectives on Noun Incorporation in Austronesian Languages." In order to explore the theoretical implications of noun incorporation (NI) fully, AFLA V will invite linguists who are native speakers of Austronesian languages to participate. The invitees are two participants from University of Antananarivo (Madagascar), one Malagasy-speaking linguist from Massey University (New Zealand), and one linguist from the University of the South Pacific (Vanuatu). NI has been selected as the theme for the meeting because it is a highly productive strategy in the family of Austronesian languages, and also because of the significance of NI for fundamental issues of syntactic and morphological theory. Keynote speakers will present several perspectives on where NI takes place in the grammar (from transformational approaches locating NI in the syntax, through to lexicalist approaches locating NI in processes of word formation), and hence the nature of the linguistic theory required to account for its semantic and morphological properties.
