Kelabit Voice: Philippine‐Type, Indonesian‐Type or Something a Bit Different?

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines a series of voice alternations in Kelabit, a Western Austronesian language of Northern Sarawak. Traditionally, Western Austronesian languages are subcategorised into ‘Philippine‐type’ and ‘Indonesian‐type’ on the basis of shared structural properties. This paper raises the question, however, of whether a two‐way typology is sufficient to represent the variation within Austronesian voice systems. This comes in light of Aldridge's () claim that Western Austronesian languages have undergone a change from ergative to accusative alignment. If this is the case, we would expect to find evidence of intermediate stages in the transition. Consequently, an independent methodology for studying voice and alignment is proposed and applied to the Kelabit voice system. Comparing voices on morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels yields some interesting findings. Firstly, it suggests that the Kelabit voice‐system could represent a transition from ergative to accusative via the reanalysis of an antipassive construction as active voice. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it suggests the two‐way typology is too narrow to capture all of the distinctions in Austronesian voice systems. Thus extending such an approach to the study of Austronesian voice more generally could prove significant when addressing wider questions, such as the theory of alignment shift.