Talk:Symmetrical voice

trigger system?

Is this the same thing as a trigger system? — Gwalla | Talk 04:40, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi Gwalla. Kwamikagami wrote this. I have been planning for a long long time to go over it. I think I remember some sources calling the system "trigger".. I can dig up the references. All the articles I've read have used the term "Philippine-type focus system," but that term seems to be headed toward disfavor too, in favor of something using the term "voice." But that trigger system article is kinda imprecise...

--Ling.Nut 08:18, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

I think trigger is an outdated term, still used by conlangers. Though I need to check sources some more, the terminology used in this article jibes with what I remember from linguistic literature. --Chris S. 03:11, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

needs rewriting

I've been thinking for a long time this page needs a top-down rewrite. Maybe after this semester ends.--Ling.Nut 13:00, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Any such rewrite would need to clarify why English is analyzed as accusative and not Austronesian aligned. Consider these sentences:

1. Staisy(DIR) kicked(AT) the ball(ACC).
2. The ball(DIR) was kicked(PT) by(ERG) Staisy.

The preposition by acts as the marker of the English ergative case, and a form of be followed by the participle marks patient trigger. Is word order the big difference? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 23:21, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

No, the difference is that in English active voice is basic and the passive is derived: "Stacy kicked the ball" vs. "the ball was kicked". In Austronesian-alignment languages the two equivalents are parallel: the valency is the same, and one might argue that one is basic because it's more frequent (this would be the one analogous to the passive in English), there's not much else to make such a judgement on. — kwami (talk) 07:01, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Trigger

I did the merge from Trigger system.

I have linguistic education, but i am not an expert in this kind of languages, so please improve it. Thanks. --Amir E. Aharoni 20:26, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Focus & topic

Do we not have articles on these? This isn't really the place to cover basic issues of topic & focus, which are much broader than the scope of this topic. kwami 23:13, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I'm taking it out and adding links to topic & focus. Also taking out the stuff on trigger languages, as it's just saying the same thing with different terms, which will be very confusing to our readers. kwami 07:00, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Keep in mind that the info on trigger was just merged into this article and it should be discussed before splitting it off again. Pairadox 07:07, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

But it didn't say anything different than what we already have. With the differences in terminology, it wasn't obvious we were repeating ourselves. (Sorry, I'm just getting back online, so I haven't been keeping up with recent changes.) kwami 09:03, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Not a problem. This edit summary and your inclusion of a redlink to Trigger (linguistics) made me think you might be considering creating that article with the info you removed. Pairadox 09:31, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Good you caught me, actually. I was thinking along those lines, thinking it would need to be a summary of how the term is used. I'll take out the dead link. kwami 16:28, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

comment from article

Anon. editor added comment in article which was bot-reverted as vandalism:

[In Tagalog] the translation for BINASA must have "THE book" as object and the semantic requires the book to be completely read (whereas BUMASA NG AKLAT only implies indef book or partial reading)

Sorry, but this is all just not true. You are mixing up transitivity (valency of verb) and active/passive voice. To counter your claim, note that english active verbs are seen as both transitive and intransitive, and the object may be definite or indefinite. However passive verbs must be transitive (you claim they are all intransitive!) Since the english passive has both object (promoted to subject) and agent. Philippine languages to not act at all as you claim "performing functions similar to active and passive." philippine (so-called) actor voice (focus) must have an indefinite/partitive object, whereas all other voices have a fully affected patient/object. "actor voice" is only semantically intransitive, and contrasts syntactically and in terms of affectedness of patient with the fully transitive voices. User:203.177.180.43 04:26, 2008 January 17

I was thinking of adding in the first comment, but don't know if the difference is due to the trigger, or implied by the tense. (Past tense tends to be more transitive than present.)

As for the second point, I think we're talking at cross purposes, with different definitions of transitivity. The difference between active and passive is very often one of definiteness or affectedness of the object, so it looks like we may agree here.

If in Tagalog the difference truly is one of affectedness (and this isn't just a strong tendency, as in English), we should definitely include that. However, all the debate over what's going on with Philippine languages leads me to suspect it isn't so simple. Anyway, if it is affectedness, that would imply that the patient trigger/voice is more transitive than the agent trigger/voice. kwami (talk) 12:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Viewpoints of focus system

I've added some stuff from Encyclopedia Britannica to the "In Tagalog" section in a hurry, and hopefully someone can look it over for corrections/clarifications. — Stevey7788 (talk) 03:05, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

How is this any different from nominative/accusative in languages like Russian?

The passive voice in Russian (and most Slavic languages) takes its patient in the nominative and its agent in the instrumental case typically. How is this at all different from saying that instrumental = ergative, nominative = direct and accusative = accusative. You arrive at the same system as Austronesian except that here the patient trigger is the standard voice and not the agent trigger. Looking at how in these languages the ergative case typically evolves from an instrumental or ablative case which is typically used in such constructs, I don't see how it's anything different from each other.81.204.20.107 (talk) 00:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

You could use that argument to say that Russian is the same as ergative languages like Basque. In an accusative language, a transitive verb is governed by the agent, and becomes intransitive when governed by the patient. In an ergative language, a transitive verb is governed by the patient, and becomes intransitive when governed by the agent. In an Austronesian-type language, a transitive verb remains transitive regardless of whether it's governed by the agent or the patient. — kwami (talk) 02:48, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

The difference is that in Russian and other Accusative alignment languages, passive clauses are intransitive; whereas in Austronesian languages, Non-Actor Voice (NAV) clauses are transitive, that is, the ergative agent is syntactically a core argument. Moreover, the case used for transitive agents in Austronesian languages is genitive, and the voice system itself likely evolved from nominalizations - see Starosta, Pawley, and Reid (1981) for information on the latter. Goderich (talk) 06:04, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Lynch et al. 2002 reference

I have "The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems" in front of me right now, and there is no chapter in the entire book written by John Lynch. The sentences cited in the article are not to be found on page 59 of the book, nor anywhere else in it that I can see. Correct reference information should be provided. Goderich (talk) 06:14, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

OR issues

This article has several OR issues, which are even indirectly admitted by the editor who did most of the recent edits. Yet, self-declared OR is still OR, and should be carefully avoided in WP.

1. Most data for individual languages (including reconstructed Proto Austronesian) have a footnote that goes: "Glosses and translations modified for the Wikipedia article." However, the editor has not indicated which modifications were made, and the critical reader is left with cross-checking the original sources. Minor adjustments–like harmonizing the terminology for voice (=focus/trigger etc.)–is fine, as long as it remains transparent. The way it is handled in this article is not legitimate and plain OR. In some cases, the modifications are simply wrong, as in the case of Cebuano, where Bell's "locative voice" is mapped by "circumstantial trigger". Otherwise, the contributions are well-written and -formatted. Therefore, I will check the sources one-by-one, and add transparency to the data presented here.

2. The table in section 2.2. (Types of Semantic Roles) is assembled from "the data found in this Wikipedia article, and should not be taken as exhaustive for each language". This is classic OR which comes as a synthesis from sourced data. And if it is not exhaustive, why put it here in the first place? I will delete it, and later replace it with an overwiew from a reliable source.

Finally, the terminology is POV-ish and does not reflect majority usage. "Agent Trigger, etc." is rarely found in the relevant literature, more common are "Agent Focus" (in older texts) and simple "Agent Voice", which latter is more or less standard usage. Further, "Actor" is more commonly used than "Agent". "Direct case" is usually called "nominative case" (although this usage deviates from the typologist's definition of "nominative case"). I will replace "Trigger" with "Voice", "Agent" with "Actor", but will keep "direct case". The use of "subject" is fine, although one should mention the competing terms "pivot" or "topic" (the latter again deviating from common usage). –Austronesier (talk) 09:04, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Symmetrical Voice

I ended up here after discovering that there is no WP entry for Symmetrical voice. My first thought was, well maybe that should link here. But after reading through the page I think it might be better to attempt a full re-write drawing on modern sources. Symmetrical voice seems to better reflect modern usage (as in Riesberg 2014, or at least Western Austronesian Voice (as in Chen and McDonnell 2019). Labeling this article as unqualified Austronesian might be misleading: it's true that proto-AN was likely a symmetrical voice language, but symmetrical voice is only found in a fraction of AN languages, absent for instance in the Oceanic languages which comprise almost half of the family. Voice and alignment are generally construed as two different things, but here with Philippine+ languages the voice alternations are the alignment system. This leaves us with somewhat of a terminological cesspool. Alignment is an attractive label in that it conveys the sense that these systems exist in lieu of more traditional alignment nom-acc, erg-abs or semantically-aligned systems. But voice better describes what's actually going on in these systems (see Zúñiga and Kittilä 2019. --Gholton (talk) 15:13, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

@Gholton: I agree that "symmetrical voice" is the better term. It's the best theory-neutral label. "Voice" is a bit problematic insofar as valency-neutral voice (with AV and UV) in some languages is paired with valency-reducing voices in the classical Dixonian sense (passive and antipassive, cf. Doug Laskowske's MA thesis on Bugis). Actually, these are two different things. But in any case, "voice" is the most common label now for what we see in western AN languages; focus and pivot have gone out of fashion ("pivot" still occasionally being used for the NP that most would simply call "subject" nowadays).

A re-write is advisable. As of now, it is just an amassment of examples indulging in all possible permutations with a Ph-type bias (Indonesian-type languages with symmetrical voice like Toba Batak are totally left out). But there is no illustration how symmetrical voice works, especially the triggers (definiteness, WH-agreement etc.) for voice selection. –Austronesier (talk) 15:51, 28 April 2021 (UTC)