Determiner Removal in Balinese non-pivot agents
Imke Driemel, Sören E. Tebay
August 2021
 

Patient voice clauses within the symmetric voice system of Balinese disallow any extraction from the external argument position, while definite external arguments are blocked from occurring altogether (Wechsler and Arka 1998). The former is traditionally taken as evidence for syntactic ergativity in Austronesian (Huang 1994, Aldridge 2004, et seq.). The latter has recently been argued to provide evidence for post-syntactic case licensing via adjacency with the verb (Levin 2015, Erlewine et al. 2015, et seq.). In this paper, we offer a simple alternative explanation to the in situ properties of patient voice agents in Balinese – one that does not make reference to case. We argue that patient voice heads come with a feature that triggers DP-shell removal of the external argument (Müller 2017), resulting in the loss of a determiner and a category D-feature that would otherwise enable extraction.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005866
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: accepted for Syntax
keywords: austronesian, balinese, symmetric voice, ergativity, structure removal, pf case-licensing, definiteness, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v1 [April 2021]
Downloaded:771 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]