The Javanese free exceptive and its implications for ellipsis constraints in Austronesian
Luané Lennox, Victoria Chen, Eric Potsdam
April 2024 

There remains considerable debate over the analysis of voice in Western Austronesian languages, whether it is like voice in English and other Indo-European languages or not. Merchant (2013) notes that voice mismatch under clausal ellipsis is impossible in languages with English-type voice. We show using free exceptives and sluicing that this is not the case with Philippine-type voice, where voice mismatches are possible. We take this contrast to argue that Philippine-type voice should not be analyzed in the same way as English-type voice, and is better viewed as morphology hosted outside of the the ellipsis site (i.e. VoiceP), as suggested by recent A-bar approaches to Philippine-type languages. The proposal makes largely correct predictions for Austronesian-languages with European-type voice constructions, where voice mismatch again becomes impossible. We also use this diagnostic to argue that the voice system in Javanese should be analyzed as being of the Philippine-type.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008094 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 30th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistic Association (AFLA 30)
keywords:	voice, exceptive constructions, javanese language, acehnese language, sluicing, puyuma, austronesian-type voice system, ellipsis, syntax
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