Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT) and Magdalena Lohninger (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg)
Title: Austronesian pivots: topics or subjects? A Malayo-Polynesian typology
Time: Thursday, September 4, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: A long standing debate on the Austronesian voice system is whether pivotsthe pragmatically and syntactically most salient clausal argument- are V2-like topics or derived subjects. By investigating micro-variation across the Malayo-Polynesian branch (Tagalog, Balinese, Malagasy, Acehnese, Standard Indonesian), this talk proposes that the syntactic status of pivots varies across languages, though in a unidirectional manner, ranging from pure topicalization to argument-structure alternation. We focus on the A/A’ status of pivots (weak crossover and reconstruction), their subjecthood properties (obligatory control and their impact on licensing of non-pivot agents) and info-structural effects (formal and pragmatic discourse restrictions). Crucially, this variation is not arbitrary but aligns pivots on a continuous cline from topichood to subjecthood, with intermediate stages in-between.
We suggest that this cline results from an ongoing process of topic-to-subject grammaticalization, instantiated as topic-to-subject lowering. We examine four stages of this reanalysis, showing that they stand in an implicational hierarchy, each step incrementally feeding into the next. In stage 1 (Tagalog), the pivot is an obligatory topic, driven by information-structure, but already exhibits some A-movement properties due to the status of Malayo-Polynesian languages as discourse-configurational systems. In stage 2 (Balinese), the pivot acquires a surface-subject status, and its (high) landing site is re-interpreted as a case-assigning position; in Object/Theme Voice, this triggers the voice domain to become a non-canonical passive, which enforces the in-situ (non-demoted) agent to be licensed via strict verbal adjacency. In stage 3 (Malagasy), the voice domain loses its ability to case-license its internal argument with accusative. In the last stage (Acehnese, Standard Indonesian), the topic flavor and discourse restrictions on pivot promotion disappear.
Finally, we address the status of Malayo-Polynesian pivots with respect to the two other typical subject properties, namely, imperatives/hortatives and anaphor binding. Though these diagnostics are sensitive to independent confounds and seem to only target the agent, we show that, once these caveats are dispensed with, they align with obligatory control in targeting the surface subject, whether the agent or not. Relevant case studies on the matter will be the Tagalog non-volitive construction and the several passive-like constructions of Indonesian-type languages.