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 explanatio...

Mainstream linguistic theory has traditionally assumed that children come into the world with rich innate knowledge about language and grammar. More recently, computational work using distributional algorithms has shown that the information contained in the input is much richer than proposed by the nativist approach. However, neither of these approaches has been developed to the point of provid...