“Absolutive” marks agreement, not Case: against the syntactic ergative analysis for the Austronesian-type voice system*1

To remain theory neutral, we use the abstract labels X, Y, and Pivot to refer to the morphological marking on the external argument of a PV clause, the internal argument of an AV clause, and the sole phrase eligible for A’-extraction in a clause, respectively, throughout the paper. Under the ergative analysis, the external argument of AV clauses (1a) receives structural Case from T (namely, Pivot marks absolutive), with the internal argument non-structurally licensed, whereby AV clauses are structurally intransitive with “demoted” oblique objects (e.g. Payne 1982; Mithun 1994; Aldridge 2004 et seq.). Patient voice (PV) clauses (1b), on the other hand, are claimed to possess inherently Case-licensed external arguments, leaving absolutive Case available to the internal argument; PV objects thus share the same morphological marking with the external arguments of AV clauses (1). The well known A’-extraction asymmetry in Philippine-type languages is therefore attributed to the crosslinguistic generalization that in syntactically ergative languages, only absolutive-marked phrases can be A’-extracted.