[Lingtyp] query: instrument voice

Tue Feb 22 21:03:21 UTC 2022

David,

Part of the problem is that your original query did not specify in detail what exactly it is that characterizes these constructions, what it is that you think that they share that is crosslinguistically unusual. Your email only characterized the constructions as similar to Philippine-type instrumental voice and consulting sources on some of the non-Austronesian languages you mentioned, what I found was more like an applicative than a Philippine-type instrumental voice. Your original email seemed to be asking for other examples of Philippine-type instrumental voice, but it is now clear that what you are looking for is a constellation of features that may be an areal feature of the Bird's Head and adjacent areas and it is only in your latest email that it begins to emerge what that constellation of features is.

But I acknowledge that the Hatam construction and others like it are definitely not prototypical applicative constructions, precisely because they involve a type of serial verb construction. From where I am sitting, what seems unusual about the construction is that it involves a combination of a serial verb construction with an applicative construction, without much similarity to Philippine-type instrumental voice. But if your interest in finding out if there are other languages with similar constructions, the issue of whether it is similar to Philippine-type instrumental voice seems irrelevant.

Perhaps if you spelled out more clearly what the constellation of features is that you see as characterizing the construction, people might be able identify other cases. My hunch is that what you are looking for is rare outside your area if it exists at all.

Matthew

From: David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>
Date: Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 3:29 PM
To: Matthew Dryer <dryer at buffalo.edu>, "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] query: instrument voice

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><mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de><mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
Date: Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 7:42 AM
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org"<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org><mailto: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>

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<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>

Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713

Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091

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