Preferred argument structure in an active language: Arguments against the category ‘intransitive subject’

Abstract

Acehnese, an Austronesian language of north Sumatra, is of the ‘active’, or so-called ‘Split-S’ (Dixon (1979)) type: some intransitive verbs take arguments which have the distinguishing properties of ‘transitive subjects’, and others take arguments with the properties of ‘transitive objects’. This distinction can be motivated for Acehnese on syntactic, semantic and discourse grounds, with the main focus of this paper on the motivation from discourse, in which special attention is paid to Du Bois' (1985, 1987a,b) treatment of the discourse motivation for ergativity. The two principal conclusions to be drawn from the Acehnese data are that: (i) there is no language internal basis for identifying an intransitive subject category; and, more importantly, (ii) the redundancy, or parallelism in patterning between semantics, syntax and discourse in Acehnese is unlikely to be accounted for by an approach which treats any one of these three domains as prior: instead a model of language is suggested in which the interaction of these separate domains, not their independent structures, is the ultimate object of linguistic description.