Not cut to fit - zero-coded passives in African languages

The 53rd Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS53), 2023

A subset of Austronesian languages known as the Indonesian-type have long been considered typologically unusual wherein an ergative-aligned object voice construction co-occurs with Indo-European-style passive voice and an accusative-aligned active voice construction. We demonstrate instead that one of these languages—Javanese—is not as typologically rare as previously thought. Previously overlooked aspects of Javanese syntax indicate that the language is best viewed as exhibiting a run-of-the-mill accusative case system wherein the so-called “active vs. object voice alternation” indexes subject vs. nonsubject topicalization. We then present independent evidence that Javanese’s so-called “passive construction” is essentially an object voice construction that contains a third-person subject/initiator, according to which Javanese does not exhibit an Indo-European-type passive. We conclude that Javanese exhibits a reduced Philippine-style voice system where voice alternation is an Ā-phenomenon associated with topicalization and not argument structure alternation, similar to the “voice” system of Tagalog (Shibatani 1988; Richards 2000; Chen 2017), Malagasy (Pearson 2005), and Puyuma (Chen 2017) and the Nilotic language Dinka (van Urk 2015). This new analysis has important broader implications for our understanding of the syntactic typology of voice. Not only does it reveal a new locus of variation within languages traditionally considered to have a “hybrid” voice system where Indo-European-type voice co-occur with Austronesian-type voice, but it also reveals previously unknown variation within a cline of constructions traditionally termed the Indonesian-type passives, many of which have been claimed to be structurally equivalent to Indo-European-type passives (e.g. Indonesian: Aldridge 2008; Acehese: Legate 2012, 2014).

Lingua, 2004

1999

The majority of world’s languages do not have passive, and the function passive fulfills can be fulfilled by other morphosyntactic means. This situation seems to apply to the Chadic languages as well; even in Hausa, the passive construction seems to have a low functional load

Wacana, 2018

This corpus of the non-standard Kudus dialect of Javanese (JDK) passive voice construction was compiled in the course of fieldwork in Kudus and was annotated to draw attention to several syntactic/semantic features. An investigation was undertaken of the di-affix in the JDK which encodes the passive function in contrast to the Standard Javanese in a quantitative descriptive analysis. The results indicate the existence of an "abbreviated agentive passive" which occurs more frequently than the "agentive passive", but less frequently than the "agentless passive". The results also show that the passives in JDK are in fact likely to have inanimate subjects and have only animate demoted agents. However, human demoted agents appear more frequently than animal agents. Also, there is a tendency for the passive without di-to be most likely to be used as an agentless passive. The results suggest that the less colloquial the genre, the less likely the passive without di-is to occur. Keywords Standard Javanese; Javanese dialect of Kudus; passive voice.

The many faces of Austronesian …, 2005

The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (2000), 2000

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 2019

There is a growing body of literature that recognises the relationship between verbal argument alternations such as passives and anticausatives. However, alternation types in Bantu languages have been treated in a rather fragmented way. In addition, the relationship between passive and anticausative constructions with regard to the realisation of an implicit external argument poses a challenge to the study of argument alternations within and across languages. The present article examines the morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic properties of passive and anticausative constructions in Kiwoso (Bantu), invoking different combinations of Voice, vCAUS and Root, as assumed in the syntactic decomposition approach. The properties of change of state verbs in licensing the anticausative and passive alternations form an integral part of this article. This article argues that the passive and anticausative in Kiwoso are distinguished on the basis of a Voice functional head, which determines the nature of events expressed by passive and anticausative verb constructions. The distinction between the (non-) occurrence of na-and ko-phrases in Kiwoso provides diagnostic evidence for this property.

2018

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Senri Ethnological Studies, 2012

This paper focuses on the optionality of ergative marking pronouns in Austronesian languages, and discusses some morphosyntactic developments that took place in association with the optional ergative marking. First, it will point out that, in a system which is commonly found in western Austronesian languages, a transitive sentence occurs in which the use of an ergative pronoun is obligatory, even when the agent of the event need not be expressed. It is assumed that such was also the system of their commonly shared ancestral language, Proto-Extra Formosan. Several developments have taken place in some of the daughter languages that are considered to result from this situation, including the emergence of optional ergative marking. These developments are examined. The second half of the paper deals with optional ergative marking and related morphosyntactic developments. In some Austronesian languages, it is found that an ergative clitic pronoun indicating the agent of a transitive sentence optionally alternates with a verb formative which marks passive. A diachronic examination of such interaction between ergative and passive sheds light on the conditions whereby optional ergative marking emerges and how the phenomenon is formalized to develop into a new sentence structure. Mechanisms of the change and possible motivations for each stage of the change are provided, as well as examples from some of the languages in which optional ergative clitic pronouns are observed.

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2020

This study investigates how the focus on a TAM and polarity value, known in the literature as operator (Dik 1989, Watters 2010) or auxiliary focus (Hyman & Watters 1984), is manifested in natural speech in Kakabe, a Mande language. I show that the opposition between the two perfective auxiliaries attested in Kakabe is best analyzed in terms of operator focus and therefore extend this notion to Mande languages for the first time. This study analyzes the operator focus on the perfective in natural speech. It leads to the discovery of new contexts relevant for the description of focused perfectives, such as performative speech acts and utterances with mental state predicates. Finally, I propose a new approach to the distribution of the inflectional markers in narratives, based on an account of the main story line as structured by one overarching Question Under Discussion.

Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 2007

While there is consensus that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) expressed "passive meaning" through middle morphology , the productivity and properties of the "middle" passive are debated, and it has been argued that 1. the passive use of middle morphology does not represent a canonical passive because of the rarity of overt demoted agents in the Indo-European (IE) daughter languages.