The Derived Intransitive in Formosan and Its Implications for the Nature of Proto-Austronesian Actor Voice

Abstract:Many Philippine-type Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan possess an understudied agentless construction formed with a mu-marked bivalent verb. This construction raises theoretical issues because bivalent verbs otherwise require an overt agent, no matter the voice type of a predicate. In this paper I demonstrate that the prefix sequence mu- consists of an Actor Voice (AV) affix m- and an agent/cause-eliminating valency-decreasing affix u-, which is likely to derive from a homophonous motion prefix prior to the split of Proto-Austronesian. The detransitivizer u-'s compatibility with AV-marked bivalent verbs in languages under seven different Austronesian primary branches, I argue, presents novel evidence against the antipassive view of prototypical AV constructions and lends new support to a transitive analysis, as derived intransitives such as antipassives are cross-linguistically incompatible with valency-decreasing operations. I argue accordingly that the ergative approach to prototypical Philippine-type languages is difficult to maintain.