Kelabit Voice: Philippine‐Type, Indonesian‐Type or Something a Bit Different?

Abstract

This paper examines a series of voice alternations in Kelabit, a Western Austronesian language of Northern Sarawak. Traditionally, Western Austronesian languages are subcategorised into ‘Philippine‐type’ and ‘Indonesian‐type’ on the basis of shared structural properties. This paper raises the question, however, of whether a two‐way typology is sufficient to represent the variation within Austronesian voice systems. This comes in light of Aldridge's () claim that Western Austronesian languages have undergone a change from ergative to accusative alignment. If this is the case, we would expect to find evidence of intermediate stages in the transition. Consequently, an independent methodology for studying voice and alignment is proposed and applied to the Kelabit voice system. Comparing voices on morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels yields some interesting findings. Firstly, it suggests that the Kelabit voice‐system could represent a transition from ergative to accusative via the reanalysis of an antipassive construction as active voice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it suggests the two‐way typology is too narrow to capture all of the distinctions in Austronesian voice systems. Thus extending such an approach to the study of Austronesian voice more generally could prove significant when addressing wider questions, such as the theory of alignment shift.

Two steps to high absolutive syntax: Austronesian voice and agent focus in Mandar

“…In clauses whose verbs show pv, in contrast, the clitic tracks the int (6b), and in those clauses, the pivot is the int. The resultant interaction between voice, agreement, and pivot status is very similar to the system that has been described in Philippine-type languages, where an analogous voice alternation determines the identity of the argument that receives a particular morphological case and shows the morphosyntactic privileges of pivot status (Schachter 1976;Payne 1982;Cumming and Wouk 1987;De Guzman 1988;Shibatani 1988;Gerdts 1988b;Guilfoyle et al 1992;Kroeger 1993b;Mithun 1994;Himmelmann 1996Himmelmann , 2005Richards 2000;Wouk and Ross 2002;Rackowski 2002;Rackowski and Richards 2005;Aldridge 2004;Riesberg 2014;McDonnell 2016;Chen 2017;Erlewine et al 2017;Erlewine and Lim 2022;Nie 2019Nie , 2020Hsieh 2020), and similar systems in other languages of Western Austronesia (Chung 1976b;Wechsler and Arka 1998;Paul 2000;Pearson 2001Pearson , 2005Legate 2014;Hemmings 2015Hemmings , 2016Erlewine 2018).…”

Methods in Language Documentation and Description: A Guide to the Kelabit Documentation Project

“…• whether the basic word order is subject-verb-object (SVO) or verb-initial (Arka, 2002;Hemmings, 2015).…”