Split Intransitivity in Tukang Besi

Abstract

The Tukang Besi language has consistent nominative-accusative morphology on its verbs, yet syntactic processes show that we need to recognize a split in the intransitive verbs. The split is roughly along the lines of agentive/controlled versus nonagentive/noncontrolled, a division that has been used to characterize unergative and unaccusative verbs in some languages. Five grammatical tests are presented that demonstrate the different subclasses of intransitive verbs, including unergative and unaccusative. 1. INTRODUCTION. Tukang Besi is an Austronesian language spoken in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, and numerous small trading settlements in other parts of the archipelago. Morphologically it follows a nominative-accusative pattern in terms of its pronominal indexing on the verb, where there is an obligatory subject prefix,' and an optional object suffix in transitive verbs, yielding two basic transitive clause types, seen in (I) and (2).2 Intransitive verbs index their sole argument with the set of subject prefixes, and cannot appear with the object suffix indexing their sole argument, seen in (3-6). Additionally, nominals exhibit case marking along a Philippine-pattern, with one argument per clause selected as the grammatical pivot and bearing the nominative case marker na. This argument is the object if the verb bears object suffixes, and the subject otherwise. All other nonoblique nominals are marked with te '(nonnominative) core'. The set of subject prefixes and object suffixes is given in Table I. There is no distinction between singular and plural in the third person,