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

Abstract

The westernmost languages of the Austronesian family show verbal alternations that are traditionally referred to as a voice system. This paper investigates the syntax of the voice system in Mandar, a language of the South Sulawesi subfamily. It argues that this alternation tracks alternations in argument structure, determines patterns of Case-Licensing in the voicep, and positions a single argument, the pivot, to raise to the highest a-position in the clause. The process that positions the pivot is decomposed into two steps: first, a process of Object Shift that moves definite arguments out of the vp and second, a process that places the pivot in spec,tp as the result of Case-Licensing by t0. Evidence for this analysis is drawn from contexts where the external argument undergoes $${\bar{\textsc {a}}}$$ A ¯ -extraction and the internal argument is definite. In that context, the language employs a special construction which allows the external argument to be the pivot, allows the internal argument to undergo Object Shift, and provides the means to Case-License it within the vp. I refer to this construction as the Agent Focus and argue that it has a syntax similar to the analogous construction in the Mayan languages of the Q’anjob’alan subfamily.

“Good Morning, Fokoamau”: An Analysis of the Addressing Terms in Pancana Language

“…Research on aspects of language, both national, international, and local languages, especially research on the syntactic structure of language (Brodkin, 2022), morphology, phonology, and even language culture (see Chung, 2008;Crouch, 2009;Travis, 2008;Elfiondri et al, 2021) has been done a lot before. Not only that but there is also research that examines language kinship, which is studied using a dialectological approach (see Susiati, 2020; Zagötö, 2018) and also the lexicostatistics approach (Ino, 2021;Polili, 2018).…”