Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions

Haude, Katharina; Zúñiga, Fernando

doi:10.1515/ling-2016-0009

Cited by 47 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…The inverse voice resembles a passive in its promotion of the patient, but there are two crucial differences between the inverse and passive voices. Syntactically, the inverse voice differs from the passive in that the agent remains a core argument rather than being demoted to an oblique role (Haude & Zúñiga 2016, Legate 2021). Pragmatically, the inverse voice typically serves to highlight a topical patient, whereas the passive voice typically serves to suppress an especially nontopical agent (Shibatani 1985), a difference that causes the inverse to be used more frequently than the passive in languages that have both voice constructions (Givón 1994: 11).…”

Section: Inverse Voice and Inverse Alignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tale of two inverses

Oxford

2023

Syntax

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The functional‐typological literature distinguishes two kinds of inverse constructions: inverse voice, in which the patient becomes the subject, and inverse alignment, in which the patient is agreed with like a canonical subject. In this literature, Algonquian languages are held to be the prototypical example of a system in which the two kinds of inverses coexist: the inverse is a “deep” voice construction in clauses with two third‐person arguments and a “shallow” alignment pattern in clauses in which a third person acts on a speech‐act participant. This article argues that that conclusion is correct and attempts to reconcile it with formal models of voice and agreement. It is proposed that despite their distinct syntactic underpinnings, both inverse constructions result in a derivation in which Voice lacks phi features and Infl indexes only the patient. This shared outcome explains why the inverse appears to be a unified phenomenon from a morphological perspective even though its syntactic correlates differ in third‐person and speech‐act‐participant contexts.

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Section: Inverse Voice and Inverse Alignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tale of two inverses

Oxford

2023

Syntax

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“…The coexistence of two or more transitive construction whose choice is based on the relative discourse prominence of the event participants is known from other direct-inverse systems, as well as from symmetrical-voice systems like that of e.g. Tagalog (see Haude and Zúñiga, 2016, for an overview); especially the latter also show a clear argument asymmetry, in which the syntactically privileged argument is selected according to the discourse-pragmatic properties of its referent. At the same time, Movima goes one step further in that its argument asymmetry also involves the factors person and animacy.…”

Section: Wh-questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On discourse-semantic prominence, syntactic prominence, and prominence of expression: The case of Movima

Haude¹

2019

Journal of Pragmatics

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HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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“…3. Philippine-type Western Austronesian languages, where the privileged argument can have any semantic role, as indicated by verb morphology (Haude and Zúñiga 2016;Kroeger 1993;Schachter 1976;Shibatani 1988).…”

Section: Imperativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical relations in Movima

Haude¹

2019

Typological Studies in Language

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New perspectives on grammatical relations, 213-256. [Typological Studies in Language 123]. Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena and Balthasar Bickel (eds). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 1 Several research institutions and programmes have made possible the research on which this article is based: My home institution SeDyL (CNRS-INALCO-IRD); the programme Investissements d'Avenir overseen by the French National Research Agency, ANR-10-LABX-0083 (Labex EFL/GD1); the ANR-funded project Cortypo (ANR-12-BSH2-0011). The data were collected during the Movima documentation project (DOBES, Volkswagen Foundation, Az. II-81914/54349) and the project Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax of the EuroBABEL/EuroCores programme (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft HA-5910/1-1). The specific annotation of three-participant events in the Movima corpus, which shed new light on the potential argument status of an oblique-marked RP, was carried out thanks to the DOBES project The expression of three-participant events in a cross-linguistic perspective (Volkswagen Foundation, Az. II-86740). The colloquium of Area B of the CRC 1252 Prominence in Language provided insights into the role of the agency in argument encoding. I wish to thank the Movima speakers who provided the data presented here for their willingness to share their knowledge with me. The editors of this volume are thanked for their detailed, helpful, and sometimes challenging remarks on a previous version of this paper. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for all remaining errors and shortcomings.respect to which argument can be deleted (5.2), embedded clauses, whose arguments are not retrieved from the main clause (5.3), and quantifier floating, which seems to show a bias towards S and P, but is not restricted to these relations (5.4). Conclusions are drawn in Section 6.The annotated corpus on which the present study is based consists of approximately 130,000 words (30 hours) collected in the field from approximately 50 speakers between 2001 and 2012. 2 The basic clause and its components 2.1 The direct-inverse systemMovima is a language with a direct-inverse system: Bivalent verbs receive morphological marking -either "direct" or "inverse" -indicating the semantic roles A vs. P/G/T of the nominal arguments. There is neither person-indexing morphology on the verb nor case marking distinguishing the two arguments of transitive clauses. Movima argument encoding is best described in terms of constituency: One argument of the transitive clause is encoded by a constituent internal to the predicate phrase and the other one is encoded by a constituent external to the predicate phrase. The predicate phrase occupies the first position in a pragmatically unmarked (i.e. "basic") clause. A first illustration of transitive clauses and the direct/inverse alternation is given in (1), with square brackets indicating the constituent structure. Here, the internal constituent is a cliticized pronoun and the external constituent is a referential phrase (RP), consisting of a determiner and a con...

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Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions

Cited by 47 publications

References 37 publications

A tale of two inverses

A tale of two inverses

On discourse-semantic prominence, syntactic prominence, and prominence of expression: The case of Movima

Grammatical relations in Movima

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