• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The development of the English-type passive in Balinese Hiroki Nomoto ABSTRACT The morpheme -a in Balinese is ambiguous because it can serve as a third person enclitic pronoun or a passive voice marker. Various views exist about whether the morpheme can be a pronoun in the presence of a teken agentive phrase. This paper argues that it can and that the construction in which the pronoun -a and a teken phrase co-occur (the hybrid type) is an instance of clitic doubling. A hypothesis is proposed about how the third person pronoun became a passive marker and how various passive subtypes came into existence. It is claimed that the hybrid type played a key role in the change. The hybrid type supports the analysis of passives in general as a clitic doubling construction (Baker, Johnson, and Roberts 1989). A clitic doubling analysis of passives enables a new typology of passives whereby passives are classified according to how the clitic and its double in a passive clause are expressed. KEYWORDS: Balinese; Classical Malay; voice; passives; clitic doubling. 1. INTRODUCTION Balinese has clauses with the bound morpheme -a, as in (1). Example (1) is a transitive clause, where the agent follows the verb, and is expressed by the third person enclitic pronoun -a. (1) Nasi-ne jemak-a. rice-DEF take-A ‘S/he took the rice.’ (Artawa 1998: 10) An a-marked clause can be accompanied by an agentive PP, as in (2). (2) Nasi-ne ajeng-a [teken anak-e ento]. rice-DEF eat-A by person-DEF that ‘That person ate the rice.’ (Artawa 1998: 10) Traditionally, both constructions have been described as passives (for example, Kersten 1984). However, various views exist in recent analyses. These analyses differ in whether (1) and (2) represent one single construction or two distinct constructions. I Ketut Artawa regards (1) and (2) as a single construction, which he calls the “Ø- construction” (Artawa 1998) and “bare verb construction” (Artawa 2013). Only one -a morpheme exists in the language, namely the third person enclitic pronoun -a. I Wayan Hiroki Nomoto is an associate professor of Malay language and linguistics at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His areas of research are syntax, semantics and language resource development in Malay/Indonesian. He has recently developed two important resources: the morphological dictionary MALINDO Morph and the concordancer MALINDO Conc, both of which are publicly available online. Hiroki Nomoto can be contacted at: [email protected]. Arka, on the other hand, argues that two distinct voice constructions are involved in (1) and (2) (Arka 2003, 2008). While (2) with an agentive PP is unambiguously passive, (1) without an agentive PP could be passive or what he calls the “object voice”. Arka recognizes two homophonous -a morphemes. The -a in a passive clause is a passive voice marker whereas the -a in an object voice clause is the third person enclitic pronoun. In fact, Artawa (2013) is aware of the passive marker-like use of -a. He thus states that -a can “be interpreted as” or “shift to” a passive marker in the presence of an agentive phrase, as in (2). Since it is not obvious how to implement this idea technically, I take the statement as admitting that synchronically there exists another -a morpheme which is distinct from the third person enclitic -a, namely the passive voice marker -a.1 I thus assume that contemporary Balinese possesses two -a morphemes, namely the third person enclitic pronoun -a and the passive voice marker -a. Both Artawa and Arka think that the former is historically older and the latter developed from it. Artawa’s use of the expression “shift to” implies he thinks that way. Arka (2008) explicitly writes that “the bound form [the third person enclitic -a] has changed to become a passive-like suffix” because the low register lacks the equivalent of the ka- passive available in the high register. This paper offers a hypothesis about how the enclitic -a turned into a passive marker and why such a change was possible at all. I will show that a similar change has happened in Standard Malay (henceforth “Malay”). The changes that occurred in Malay and Balinese are important not only empirically but also theoretically because they support Baker, Johnson, and Roberts’s (1989) basic insight of comparing passives to clitic doubling. Relatedly, they also show that the so-called Philippine-type voice system, where non-active voice clauses are clearly transitive, is not special typologically, but it is in fact connected to the English-type voice system, where non-active clauses do not appear to be transitive. The Balinese and Malay facts reveal that the intransitive look is only apparent. This paper is organized as follows. Since the term “passive” is used in various ways in the literature, I will first present my own definition of the term in section 2. Basic facts of the Balinese voice system are also presented in this section in comparison with that of Malay. In section 3, I claim that Artawa’s view that the morpheme -a can be the third person enclitic pronoun in the presence of a teken agentive phrase is supported by a similar fact in di- passives in Classical Malay. The hybrid type, where the two co-occur, is analysed as a clitic doubling construction in section 4. Section 5 proposes a hypothesis about the development of various passive types. Section 6 is the conclusion. The section discusses theoretical implications that the present study has for the analysis of passives in general and offers a new typology of passives, which does not exclude the object voice and the so-called Philippine-type symmetrical voice system as fundamentally different phenomena. 1 Note that the presence of two -a morphemes is compatible with Artawa’s view that (1) and (2) belong to the same construction. It is not uncommon that a construction involves more than one morpheme characterizing it. For example, the actor voice construction in Tagalog has subconstructions with different actor voice markers such as -um-, mag-, ma- and mang-. Similarly, one can think of a passive voice construction involving subconstructions characterized by different passive voice markers. 2 2. VOICE CATEGORIES AND MARKERS The term “passive” is a tricky one in linguistics. Different authors define it differently. Consequently, the same term, “passive”, can sometimes refer to totally different constructions. One common definition of the passive, which I do not adopt myself, makes reference to the external argument of a verb, which plays semantic roles such as agent, cause and experiencer. For instance, one can define a passive clause as a construction where the external argument is backgrounded. This functional definition captures the well-known fact that the referent denoted by the external argument is not completely absent in the semantics of a passive clause. At the same time, it will also include sentences that are not traditionally considered passive such as They speak Singlish in Singapore, in which the referent of they, namely Singaporeans, is said to be backgrounded (Givo´n 2001: 94). My definition of the passive (see Nomoto 2015b: section 2 for details) does not make reference to the external argument but exclusively to the internal argument, which plays semantic roles such as theme and patient. A passive clause is defined as a construction where the internal argument is not licensed by the verb. Roughly speaking, an argument noun phrase introduced into a syntactic structure must be licensed by a particular licensor in order to stay in the structure. In the case of the internal argument, the default licensor is the verb, and it can remain in the original position if it is licensed by the verb. This is what happens in an active clause. If the internal argument fails to be licensed by the verb, it must be licensed by another licensor, in which case the relevant noun phrase occurs in a dislocated position or occurs in the original position but with special prosodic effects (see Tjung 2006 for a discussion of post-verbal internal arguments in Indonesian). This happens in a passive clause. How the external argument is licensed/encoded does not concern the active-passive distinction but classifies the passive voice into subtypes. As an illustration of how this definition works, let us examine the Malay voice system of Malay first. Examples (3a) and (3b) are active sentences because the internal argument dokumen itu ‘the document’ is licensed in its initially merged object position. By contrast, (3c) and (3d) are passive sentences because the same noun phrase is displaced to the pre- auxiliary subject position. The English translation is given in both active and passive, as a natural choice of voice in one language does not always match with that in another. The external argument mereka ‘they’ in (3d) is obligatory. However, this does not mean that the sentence is not passive because in my definition, whether a clause is passive or not has nothing to do with whether and how the external argument is expressed. (3) a. MeN- active2 Mereka sudah meny-[s]emak dokumen itu. they already ACT-check document that 2 This paper uses the following abbreviations not available in the Leipzig Glossing Rules: ACT: active; FAM: familiar; LINK: linker; PART: particle. 3 b. Bare active Mereka sudah semak dokumen itu. they already check document that c. Di- passive Dokumen itu sudah di-semak oleh mereka. document that already PASS-check by them d. Bare passive Dokumen itu sudah *(mereka) semak. document that already they check ‘They have already checked the document./The document has already been checked by them.’ The names of the four constructions above are given based on the verbal morphology.

Load more

  17

Copy Link