Kambera intransitive argument linking

Abstract

This paper contains a descriptive analysis of the various ways in which the sole arguments of intransitive predicates are linked to (morpho)syntax in Kambera, a little‐known Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The single argument of Kambera intransitives can be marked by five different pronominal clitic combinations, each of the constructions expressing a different contextual property. One of the constructions is the absolutive construction, in which an intransitive subject is either obligatorily or optionally treated like a transitive object (‘fluid‐S marking’, Dixon 1979, 1994). An analysis of the possible origin, structure and contextual properties of Kambera fluid‐S marking will be given and it will be proposed that in general the morphosyntactic expression of intransitive arguments is not lexically determined nor based on syntactic information coded in the lexical entry but rather depends on the context in which the verb is used. The Kambera facts will be related to the question of which information the lexical entry of an intransitive is universally supposed to contain, in particular, whether or not that information should be syntactically relevant.