The Origins of the Voice/Focus System in Austronesian

This paper puts forward a new explanation for the development of the Austronesian voice system. I argue that both voice marking and the nominalizing function of the affixes are present already at the Proto-Austronesian stage and propose that these affixes ultimately go back to reflexive markers (which further developed into intransitive markers) and prepositions. I offer a historical explanation for the development, which saw a typologically common system of transitivity markers and prepositional phrases transformed into the typologically rare voice system seen in Austronesian today. The proposal capitalizes on simple and well-motivated syntactic features: case marking, the shift from prepositions to preverbs, and reanalysis. Several previously troubling facts fall out straightforwardly from my proposal: promotion of arguments to the subject position and their semantic prominence, the existence of various peripheral functions of the voice affixes, the placement of the affixes, asymmetries in their functions, and tendencies in the later development. This paper explores the extent of the effectiveness of internal reconstruction as a tool of historical syntax. In the final part of the paper, I show how the diachronic development I have described projects to synchronic syntactic processes: historical development has transformed the Austronesian system of preverbs and transitivity markers into a system of low and high applicatives. I also analyze the synchronic syntactic stages in the development of Proto-Austronesian and use this analysis to explain the typology of preverb placement cross-linguistically.