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Share Paper 3556

One Language, Two 'Voice' Systems: Insights from Puyuma
Victoria Chen and Shin Fukuda
105-115 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

Puyuma, an understudied western Austronesian language, demonstrates the compatibility of Philippine-type and Indo-European-type voice alternations within the same clause. This compatibility is surprising under the traditional view that Philippine-type voice instantiates valency-indicating morphology hosted within VoiceP, akin to Indo-European-type voice. Drawing on novel data from Puyuma, we show that the compatibility of the two voice systems is in fact expected, as only the latter (Indo-European-type voice) constitutes a true case of voice alternation hosted in Voice; Philippine-type voice is encoded in a projection external to VoiceP, and shows the hallmarks of topic agreement encoded in the left periphery. This conclusion lends novel support to a family of A-bar agreement approaches to Philippine-type voice (Chamorro: Chung 1994; Malagasy: Pearson 2005; Tagalog: Chen 2017), and argues against an alternative ergative analysis (Mithun 1994; Aldridge 2004 et seq.), which draws on the opposite assumption that Philippine-type voice realizes Voice/applicative heads hosted within the core verbal domain.

Published in

Proceedings of the 38th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Rachel Soo, Una Y. Chow, and Sander Nederveen
Table of contents
Printed edition: $425.00