The so-called passive of Acehnese

Abstract

The Mon Tasiek dialect of Acehnese (Indonesia) was analysed by Lawler 1977 as having a passive in which the verb agrees with the initial, or underlying, subject. His argument was that the preverbal NP in Acehnese has the expected properties of a surface subject, but that verb agreement was controlled by the underlying subject—which, in ‘passive’ clauses, is not the preverbal NP. This analysis was based on limited and unrepresentative data. In the light of more extensive data, Lawler's claim that the preverbal NP in Acehnese acts as a final subject does not hold. The most obvious—and, for syntactic theory, the least problematic conclusion—is that the so-called ‘underlying’ subject is in fact a surface grammatical relation; Acehnese has no passive, and its verbal agreement is a surface phenomenon.

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