Voice and grammatical relations in Lamaholot of eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This paper analyses voice and grammatical relations in Lamaholot (eastern Indonesia) in light of the typologies of voice systems in western Austronesian languages. In the literature, languages of eastern Indonesia are assumed either not to display any grammaticized voice contrasts, or to show asymmetrical voice alternations if they do. However, this literature does not take Lamaholot into account. On the one hand, this language does display various conceptual voice contrasts, such as antipassive, anticausative, and middle, by means of the transitivity alternation, addition of prepositional elements, and other periphrastic strategies. On the other hand, there are also construction types differentiated by word order for different pragmatic requirements: the Subject-Topic and the Object-Topic constructions, the ditransitive alternation, and the benefactive alternation are all used to express the same conceptual content with different arguments highlighted for pragmatic purposes. These alternations essentially perform the same syntactic/pragmatic function as the focus system in Philippine languages. Therefore, the data and analyses presented here as well as the diversity shown in the growing literature on eastern Indonesian languages call for a more comprehensive and systematic typology of western Austronesian voice systems. At the very least, it is too early to conclude that eastern Indonesian languages lack voice alternations.

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