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.
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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.
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