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
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