[Lingtyp] query: instrument voice

Tue Feb 22 20:29:38 UTC 2022

Matthew,

The construction that I'm interested in here (which does not seem to 
differ significantly across the genealogical boundary between 
Austronesian and non-Austronesian) does not seem to be a prototypical 
case of any familiar construction — which is what makes it interesting 
to me.Much of the discussion has focused on the differences between it 
and Philippine instrumental voice constructions, which I am not denying.

But you can hardly say that we're dealing here with a prototypical 
applicative either.What's crucial is that in most or all of the 
languages under consideration, the instrument NP cannot occur in 
post-verbal position, which is where you'd expect it to be in an 
applicative construction in an SVO language.Thus, for the corresponding 
prefix /k-/ in Austronesian Biak, van Heuvel (2006:420) writes that "it 
seems to be used only when this instrument is topical"— which is kind of 
the opposite of how things work in many familiar applicative 
constructions.Call it what you like (topic, subject, whatever), but the 
grammatical functions and behaviour associated with the instrument NP 
are very different not only from those of the corresponding NPs in 
clauses without instrumental verbal marking, but also from those of 
instrument NPs in other languages with an instrumental applicative marker.

As your Hatam example suggests, there is also an affinity between the 
construction in question and serial verb constructions.Peel off the 
morphology and what you've got is a garden-variety Mainland Southeast 
Asian language SVC construction along the lines of TAKE STICK HIT 
SNAKE.Alternatively, transform your Hatam inflectional forms to 
periphrastic and you get the corresponding construction in isolating 
Papuan Malay

sa

ambil

kayu

sa

pake

pukul

ular

1SG

take

stick

1SG

use

hit

snake

'I hit the snake with a stick'

where /pake/ 'use' is the periphrastic counterpart of the instrumental 
verbal prefix in Hatam, Biak, etc.(This construction is unavailable in 
other varieties of Malay, which suggests that it is due to substrate 
influence from the local New Guinea languages.)

I would conclude that the construction in question bears certain family 
resemblances to instrumental voice constructions, applicatives, and 
serial verb constructions, but is not a prototypical instance of any of 
these.Given its recurrence in (at least) three genealogically unrelated 
families of languages (Austronesian, East Bird's Head, and isolate 
Hatam), what this discussion seems to me to be suggesting is that the 
construction in question merits a term all to its own, so that its 
relationship to other constructions can be productively discussed.

David

On 22/02/2022 21:20, Matthew Dryer wrote:
>
> 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
> Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091

-- 
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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