The Palu’e passive: from pragmatic construction to grammatical device

Voice constructions are usually associated with changes in the pragmatic status of the arguments of a clause, and so bear a strong resemblance to topic constructions in terms of their information structuring effects and entailments. Importantly, however, a defining criterion of voice alternations is that they morphologically monitor the changing status of the arguments of the verb, in terms of their grammatical function identity. By contrast, topic constructions are held to not affect the grammatical status of the arguments, but to restructure their pragmatic status. Data from Palu’e, an Austronesian language of Central Indonesia, is presented showing an example of a language that has just begun grammaticalising a topic construction into a grammatical voice system, providing evidence for the origin of voice systems in pragmatic structuring devices.