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Investigating Language Structure
The classification of languages as belonging to a particular language family makes use of
comparisons of the lexicons of different languages. The principle is that when words in
pairs of languages are being compared, and structural similarities are detected, two logical
possibilities exist: that they are related through sharing a common ancestor or that any
similarity is purely coincidental and one of the words has been borrowed at some before
the present. That is, any similarity may be a sign of relatedness but is not enough in itself
to define it as such. Linguists use evidence to eliminate words from their data which
are borrowed. Then, on the basis of the remaining words, they work out the degree of
similarity between words. The more similar that word pairs in two languages are, and the
larger the number of words like this in the two lexicons, the closer the relationship between
the languages, and also the nearer the present time for any hypothesized branching point.
To investigate the internal structures of a language, the methods of language typology
can be used and these involve consideration of both the lexicon and syntactic features.
The following section describes some of the defining characteristics of Austronesian and
Non-Austronesian languages.

Austronesian Language Constructions
It is not easy to identify the typological characteristics of languages in the Austronesian
family due to the number of languages in it, the wide geographical spread of member
languages, and the time for languages to have changed since the point of common origin.
However, three definitive typological features have been pointed out by Himmelmann
(2005)which are found within Austronesian languages: (1) the use of reduplication of
nouns; (2) inclusive and exclusive marking of first person non-singular pronouns; (3) a
causative morphology structure. Another feature that marks Austronesian languages is
sentence order (Wurm, 2007). Sentence formation order tends to be S-V-O (subject-verb-
object) with the subject first followed by the verb and the object at the end of the sentence
(Pawley, 2009, Wurm, 2007).

Non-Austronesian/Papuan Language Constructions
Non-Austronesian/Papuan languages exhibit such great variation that linguists tend
to consider that they are most probably not members of a single language family, but
of several. This variation and the extremely deep time frame that they have existed,
along with limits to the quantity of data that can be found make it difficult to generalize

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