Austin Kraft

Grammatical voice is observable in the English contrast between active (“I ate an apple”) and passive (“That apple was eaten by me”). Indonesian has three such voices: active, marked by the verbal prefix meN-; passive, marked by di-; and object, with a null prefix (Cole, Hermon & Yanti 2008). Chung (1976), Sneddon et al. (2006), and others note that the agent in the object voice must be a pronoun in Standard Indonesian. Chung (1976) characterizes the object voice with an apparent flexibility in the relative linear ordering of agent and auxiliary. Arka & Manning (1998) and Cole, Hermon & Yanti (2008) find that only auxiliary-agent word orderings are acceptable. Our new findings from native speakers of Indonesian near Malang, East Java, present a twofold puzzle: not only is either ordering of agent and auxiliary acceptable, but also object voice configurations with non-pronoun agents are acceptable. Furthermore, we observe unexpected intonation patterns in auxiliary-agent word orderings with non-pronouns. In this project, we seek to clarify the relationship between agent type and the relative ordering of agent and auxiliary. We apply syntactic diagnostics of control constructions and reflexive binding to delineate structural differences in surface subjecthood and information-structural components such as topic (Alsagoff 1992, Chung 2007). Finally, we situate our findings in relation to the implicational hierarchy of agents in object voice put forth in Nomoto (2018). Our project enriches the typology of how languages represent and treat different grammatical arguments across languages and dialects.