Austronesian alignment

Austronesian alignment, commonly known as the Philippine- or Austronesian-type voice system, is a typologically unusual morphosyntactic alignment that combines features of ergative and accusative languages. It is best known from the languages of the Philippines, but is also found in Formosa, Borneo, and Madagascar, and has been reconstructed for the ancestral Proto-Austronesian language.

Whereas most languages have two voices which are used to track referents in discourse, a transitive 'active' voice and an intransitive 'passive' or 'antipassive' voice, prototypical Philippine languages have two voices which are both transitive. One of the two Philippine voices is similar in form to the active voice of ergative-absolutive languages, while the other is similar to the active voice of nominative-accusative languages. These perform functions similar to the active and passive/antipassive voices, respectively, in those languages.

The ergative-like Philippine voice has in the past often been called the "passive", and the accusative-like voice has often been called the "active". However, this terminology is misleading and is now disfavored,—not least because the "passive" is the default voice in Austronesian languages whereas a true passive is a secondary voice,—though no substitute terms have been widely accepted. Among the more common terms that have been proposed for these voices are "patient trigger" (the ergative-like voice) and "agent trigger" (the accusative-like voice), which will be used here. These phrases are taken from the terms 'agent' and 'patient', used in semantics for the acting and acted-upon participants in a transitive clause.

The three types of voice system and the grammatical cases of their core arguments can be contrasted as follows:

:'The chicken is eating "a" mango.'

Some scholars maintain that Philippine-type languages have four voices, rather than two. Beside the ones shown above, there were also locative and benefactive voices. However, these are not as central as the other two. The locative is illustrated here; the suffix on the verb indicates that the noun marked by the direct case is the location of the action rather than a participant:

::The person reads a book.

References

*Lynch "et al." 2002. In Fay Wouk & Malcolm Ross, eds., "The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems." The Australian National University. ISBN 0858834774, ISBN 9780858834774

ee also

*Focus (linguistics)
*Topic (linguistics)