[Lingtyp] query: instrument voice

[Matthew Dryer]

David,

Preverbal position in an SVO language seems to me to be a very weak factor as a subject property. There are two additional overlapping considerations that would normally be considered relevant. First, is the noun phrase in question in the same preverbal position as subjects? And second, does the S/A lack subject properties that it normally has.

Without these two additional considerations, it would seem that one would have to say that what in English What is John eating? is subject-like, since it is a preverbal constituent in an SVO language. But it does not occur in the same preverbal position as subjects and the subject does not lack its normal subject properties. The same could be said about rice in It is rice that John is eating.

You ask why some of us are talking about applicatives in their responses. One reason is that you cite Hatam, Sougb, Moskona, and Meyah as instances of what you are characterizing as constructions like Philippine instrumental voice. But these seem much more like canonical applicatives and quite unlike Philippine instrumental voice.

In the following example from Hatam, for example,

Ni-ba
tom
ni-bi-bui
wou.
1EXC-use
stick
1EXC-INS-hit
snake

We used a stick to hit the snake. (Reesink 1999: 54)

the fact that tom 'stick' precedes the verb for 'hit' is presumably best explained in terms of its being the complement of ba 'use' and there is no evidence that the A of 'hit' lacks any normal subject properties. This is very different from instrumental voice in Philippine languages.

Matthew

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>
Date: Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 7:42 AM
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] query: instrument voice


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<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>

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