Antipassive and Middle Constructions

In addition to the transitive and intransitive, ergative languages of the Polynesian group commonly have another type of construction, which is called middle. The middle construction stands somewhere in between the transitive and the intransitive. It involves two arguments, but crucially is syntactically intransitive. The subject appears in ABS, not ERG. The logical object appears in some oblique case (henceforth, OBL). This pattern of case marking strikingly resembles that of the so-called antipassive. Namely, the subject appears in ABS and the object, in OBL. However, it has never been proposed that the Polynesian middle is an instance of the antipassive. The antipassive, on the other hand, is commonly found among ergative languages. In many cases, the antipassive is an indispensable part of the syntax of languages that show syntactic ergativity. It essentially changes the underlying A into a derived S, whereby enabling the argument in question to undergo syntactic operations that apply exclusively to ABS-arguments (i.e., S and O) such as relativisation and coordination. As discussed in Chapter 5, Tongan exhibits syntactic ergativity. Thus, we have a reason to speculate that an antipassive construction might also exist in Tongan. One hypothesis will then be that what has been called middle is actually equivalent to what is called antipassive in other languages. The fact that a middle verb sometimes has a corresponding transitive verb seems to support this hypothesis.