Voice and grammatical relations in Indonesian: A new perspective

This paper deals with the voice system of Indonesian, and argues that certain of the constructions traditionally analysed as passives, should be given a different treatment, parallel to arguments by Kroeger (1993) for Tagalog. We examine the role of different conceptions of subject and their place in binding. We show that, unlike other Western Austronesian languages, the logical subject – l-subject for short (i.e., the semantically most prominent argument) plays little role in binding: being a logicalsubject alone does not make an argument a binder. Syntactic prominence is crucial, and in particular the data on binding in Indonesian presented here further confirms the notion of syntacticised argument structured (a-str) first proposed in Manning (1994, 1996b) and also adopted in Arka (1998) wherein a central role is given to the notion of a-subject. Like other Austronesian languages, the (surface) grammatical subject (i.e., the SUBJ in the f-structure or gr-subject for short) plays little role, especially in the binding of morphologically complex reflexives. The data from binding is supported by other syntactic tests such as topicalisation with pronominal copy. 1. Grammatical Relations in Indonesian in Brief Indonesian transitive verbs can appear prefixed with meNor dior without a prefix. There is evidence that the Agent/l-subject Amir appearing with meN(henceforth Agentive voice or AV) verbs in Indonesian as in (1) is syntactically the surface grammatical subject. (1) a. Amir mem-baca buku itu. Amir meN-read book that ‘Amir read the book.’ Among the important properties of the gr-subject in Indonesian (Kana 1986) are: (a) appears canonically in a preverbal position, (b) the only function that can be questioned by a clefted question word, relativised on or clefted, and (c) the only function that can be controlled, either as an equi-target of certain verbs or as the gapped function in controlled adverbial clauses. An additional test of a morphosyntactic character is that the 3sg pronoun can optionally be just ia rather than the usual dia when it is functioning as the gr-subject of a clause (adding adverbs etc. shows that this form is indeed grammatically not phonologically conditioned). Thus, Amir in (1a) is the gr-subject because it comes preverbally, it can be relativised in a cleft sentence (to give a slightly different pragmatic implication): (1) b. Amir yang mem-baca Buku itu. Amir REL meN-read Book that ‘It is Amir who read the book.’ It can be an equi-target: (1) c. Amir ingin [ __ membaca buku itu] Amir want meN-read book that It can be replaced by ia: 1 The meNprefix takes forms homorganic with a following consonant.