[Lingtyp] query: instrument voice

[David Gil]

Dear all,

I must confess to being a little puzzled at how the responses to my 
original query seem to have focused largely on applicatives. To cite 
just one example ...

On 22/02/2022 08:31, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> Once we have clear definitions, we can begin to answer David's 
> question whether languages with instrumental applicatives only are 
> rare outside of Austronesian.

A fair question, but not the one that was asking; I was asking whether 
languages with *instrument voice* only are rare outside of 
Austronesian.  Actually, what I really meant to ask is whether 
constructions like those in Roon and other proximate languages are 
attested elsewhere in the world; that is to say, constructions in which 
a verb hosts an affix denoting an instrument whose function in the 
clause looks more like a subject or topic than like a direct object or 
oblique.  I used the term "instrument voice" because this seemed to me 
to be the most appropriate term, or, to put it differently, the 
constructions i am looking at seemed to me to be more similar to, say, a 
garden-variety instrument-voice construction in Tagalog, than anything 
else I could think of, including most prototypical applicative 
constructions.  In response to my query, Mark came through with the 
Tzutujil example, and one or two others have provided potential leads 
that I will be following up on soon.

But my choice of terms led to a terminological debate, with several of 
you expressing your opinions that the constructions in question, in Roon 
and other New Guinea languages, are instances of applicatives. To which 
I would respond with a question: would you also characterize a 
Philippine-type instrumental voice construction as an applicative?

I wouldn't, which is why I phrased the question in the way that I did.  
Note that I would still acknowledge the merits of a sometimes-proposed 
analysis of Philippine voice in which, say, the instrumental voice is 
analyzed compositionally as consisting of (a) an applicative "promoting" 
oblique to direct object; in combination with (b) a passive "promoting" 
a direct object to subject.  But under such an analysis, while an 
applicative construction *forms part of* the instrument voice 
construction, the instrument voice construction as a whole is more than 
just an applicative.  (As Mark points out, a similar analysis is clearly 
called for in the case of Indonesian, in which passive /di-/ and 
applicative /-kan/ frequently co-occur.)  However, in the New Guinea 
case, there is no evidence that I am aware of for such a compositional 
analysis; the prefixes that express what I was calling instrumental 
voice provide no evidence for any kind of complex internal structure.  
Indeed, for this reason, constructions such as those with the Roon /u-/ 
prefix seem to me to offer "better" examples of "instrument voice" than 
even the Philippine constructions for which the term was originally coined.

David

-- 
David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email:gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
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