Diachronic development of the Nuclear Austronesian locative and patient applicatives

Abstract

This paper proposes reconstructions and diachronic developments of the primary patient and locative voice (PV and LV, respectively) suffixes found in the Formosan and Philippine languages. The LV suffix grammaticalized from a noun meaning ‘place’ and formed nominalized relative clauses in Proto-Austronesian (PAn) on both theme/patient and locative positions. The PV suffix *-en was innovated in a daughter of PAn called Proto-Ergative Austronesian in order to express telic events in nominalized relative clauses. The centrality of the direct object in determining the boundedness of an event is what ensured that *-en would develop as a PV marker and not be extended to other voices. The reanalysis of the nominalizations as verbal matrix clauses in Proto-Nuclear Austronesian (Ross 2009) gave birth to the specialization of *-en and *-an as PV and LV, respectively. Given that *-en could only be used in bounded events, it replaced *-an in this environment, relegating the latter primarily to LV clause types.