A Semantic and Discourse Study on the Voice System in Kanakanavu
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Liu, Hsing-Chen
Abstract
This study investigates the voice system in Kanakanavu, a Formosan language spoken in southern Taiwan, primarily from three perspectives—morphosyntax, semantic role, and discourse functions. On the one hand, our analysis reveals that Kanakanavu has three indicative voice types, namely Agent voice, Patient voice, and Instrumental voice, whereas the assumed locative marker occurs only in nominalized structure. The semantic roles triggered in a clause also vary in accordance with each voice type, with Patient voice capable of carrying the largest number of semantics roles on the nominative argument. On the other hand, the quantitative approach proposed by Givón (1983, 2001) is adopted in the analyses in order to access the notion of topicality reflected in the use of Kanakanavu voice system. By examining the statistical results retrieved from our corpus, we found that the Agent argument, whether in Actor- or Non-actor voice clauses, exhibits higher topicality, whereas the Patient argument in NAV clauses is only moderately topical and is even less so in AV ones. The discrepancy of the topicality rendered in the arguments implies that the NAV construction does not function as passive, but rather as a transitive clause with two core-like arguments. This result corroborates the feasibility of analyzing two-argument AV clauses in Kanakanavu, as well as in some other Formosan languages, as Extended Intransitive Constructions (Dixon 1984, Huang and Tanangkingsing 2011). We will finally incorporate the above results with regard to voice morphology, semantics and discourse behavior, and attempt to compare with Tsou on a typological scale. Our findings reveal that in the continuum of the pragmatics of Austronesian languages, Kanakanavu may be positioned between Tsou and Seediq (cf. Huang 2002).
Subjects
卡那卡那富語
焦點系統
構詞句法
語意角色
語用功能
Type
thesis
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