I’m a native Filipino speaker and I’m not sure if I can understand the concept completely based on what I’ve read on Wikipedia.
In: 3
Lucky you, I wrote an 11-page paper on this for my morphology class lol
Basically, typically you expect that a language has a default voice. I speak English and Spanish, which have active voice as a default, and the key is that to change to passive, you have to introduce *more morphosyntactic complexity*. English passive voice requires an additional auxiliary verb, and the use of the past participle, which means additional marking on the verb if the active sentence being made passive isn’t already past tense.
Other languages do it other ways, maybe your default is passive and you use an antipassive that requires more morphosyntactic complexity.
And then you have languages with symmetrical voice. There are languages outside of the Austronesian family that do this, but you mostly find symmetrical voice in the western Austronesian languages (this is a typological category, not a genetic one; western Austronesian languages are not more closely related than other Austronesian languages). In these languages, there is no default voice. All voices are equally morphosyntactically complex. In Indonesia, usually there are two, and in the Philippines there are more, but either way, no voice is more or less complex than another. Let me see if I can find my old paper and I’ll give examples.
Edit: disclaimer— I don’t speak any languages with this feature, so my ability to explain it fully is limited. I chose the topic because a lot of my extended family speaks Filipino languages
Austronesian alignment, also known as symmetrical voice or the Philippine-type voice system, is a typologically unusual kind of morphosyntactic alignment in which “one argument can be marked as having a special relationship to the verb”. This special relationship manifests itself as a voice affix on the verb that corresponds to the syntactic role of a noun within the clause, that is either marked for a particular grammatical case or is found in a privileged structural position within the clause or both.
In Austronesian languages, the two core arguments of a transitive clause, the agent and the patient, are not distinguished in terms of their syntactic roles. Instead, the verb is marked to indicate which argument is the focus of the clause. The focus can be the agent, the patient, or some other entity that is not directly involved in the action of the verb.
Latest Answers