Passive without passive morphology? Evidence from Manggarai

Abstract

Introduction: This paper deals with a passive like construction in Manggarai2 which appears to be typologically unusual because it has no specific verbal passive morphology on the verb. Rather than marking on the verb, the passive in Manggarai is marked on the Agent argument analytically, i.e. by means of the preposition le, which can get shortened as l=.3 This is illustrated by sentences in (1): sentence (1a) is a canonical sentence with the Agent coming before the verb and sentence (1b) is a pragmatically marked structure with the Agent being backgrounded coming after the verb and gets marked by l=.4 (1)a. Aku cero latung=k 1s fry corn-1s ‘I fry/am frying corn’ b. Latung hitu cero l=aku=i corn that fry by-1s=3s ‘The corn is (being) fried by me’ In this paper we argue that sentence (1b) is indeed syntactically passive. That is, (i) the patient latung, which was Object in (1a), is Subject in (1b);5 and (ii) the Agent aku marked by prepositional clitic l= in (1b) is syntactically a non-core argument.6 We will present the evidence shortly to prove the idea that sentence (1b) is an instance of passive despite the fact that the verb has the same form as that in (active) sentence (1a). We argue that the non-typical characteristics of the le passive in Manggarai are independently motivated by Manggarai’s language specific property as an isolating language. The paper is organised as follows. First, basic surface clause structures in Manggarai will be presented in section 2, followed by a brief discussion on clitic sets in section 3. Evidence for passive constructions without passive morphology is given in section 4. A typological note of the analysis is discussed in section 5. Finally, the conclusion is given in section 6.