Characteristic of many of the Oceanic languages of the Pacific is the presence of several valency-changing devices. This work is an historical study of three valency-increasing and two valency-decreasing morphemes, presenting descriptions of their reflexes in a number of modern Oceanic languages and a detailed reconstruction of their forms and functions in the ancestor language, Proto Oceanic. The reconstructions of valency-changing devices is presented within of an analysis of morphosyntactic classes of verbs, both in the modern languages and in Proto Oceanic.

This is the first volume in the Studies in Language Change series, published by Pacific Linguistics in association with the Centre for Research on Language Change at the Australian National University.