A number of Western Austronesian languages have more than one construction for clauses with two-place verbs. Word-order and/or case-marking varies, as does the form of the verb, but propositional meaning is not affected. The phenomena in question include the nasal-verb / zero-verb alternation of Balinese and the "focus" possibilities of Tagalog and other Philippine languages. Two related questions must be asked about such languages. Firstly, is the difference between the various constructions in Western Austronesian of the same type as the difference between active voice and passive voice in European languages? And if these are voice variations, which form should be taken as basic - that is, which languages are of the nominative-accusative type, and which are ergative languages? This workshop will examine the sort of answers to these questions which are possible in a framework such as LFG. The first part of the workshop will consist of a keynote presentation by Bill Foley (University of Sydney) of his recent work on Tagalog. The presentation will be followed by comments from invited participants, and general discussion. The second part of the workshop will consist of brief presentations of data from some Austronesian languages, which will provide the basis for a further discussion of the issues mentioned above. The papers which are marked as links below are available to view or to download.

1:30pm - 1:50pm	Introduction: The problem of voice and grammatical functions in Western Austronesian languages	Simon Musgrave	Uni. of Melbourne
1:50pm - 2:40pm	Symmetrical Voice Systems and Precategoriality in Philippine Languages	Bill Foley	Uni. of Sydney
2:40pm - 3:00pm	Nouns and Verbs in Tagalog: A Response to Foley	Paul Kroeger	SIL, Darwin
3:00pm - 3:20pm	Question period
3:20pm - 3:40pm	BREAK
3:40pm - 4:00pm	Reply to Kroeger	Bill Foley	Uni. of Sydney
4:00pm - 4:30pm	Discussion
4:30pm - 4:50pm	BREAK
4:50pm - 5:20pm	Control of Complex Arguments in Balinese	I Wayan Arka Jane Simpson	Udayana Uni. Uni. of Sydney
5:20pm - 5:50pm	Evidence for Grammatical Functions in Tongan	Mike Dukes	Uni. of Canterbury
5:50pm - 6:30pm	Discussion

If after reading any of the papers in this workshop, you are interested in presenting a prepared response, please contact the convenors, by e-mail or at the following address and fax location:

USER NOTES: Papers can be viewed in a frames format or a no frames format, except for Musgrave's paper which has no internal divisions. The navigation buttons located in the lower frame of the frames versions are also located at the bottom of each page of the no frames versions. In the frames version, two links (to this page and to download the paper) are only visible if you scroll down in the lower frame. For serious reading in the frames version, I would recommend closing some toolbars in your browser in order to enlarge the screen area. The examples in all the papers were formatted on a 15" screen, and no responsibility is taken for their appearance on other screens. Part 5 of Foley's paper will download slowly: this section of the paper contains a number of diagrams which are presented as graphic files. Please be patient! Footnotes appear as links to a separate file thus: [1]. Each note has return links to both the frames and the no frames versions of the relevant paper. Due to the non-availability of many fonts in html, some characters in examples have been substituted as follows:

A couple of Foley's diagrams require g^w and k^w characters. The superscripting was not available in my graphics package, and is missing.

Created: 31 May 1998
Last modified: 12 June 1998

Authorised by: P. Austin, Professor and HOD, Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

Access: International
Copyright © 1998, The University of Melbourne.
Maintainer: Simon Musgrave