The Semantics of Semantic Alignment in eastern Indonesia

Over the past few decades, much research has addressed the nature of alignment systems, that is, how core syntactic functions are organized relative to each other. The major patterns of alignment are defined in relation to S (the single argument of a one-place predicate), A (the agent argument of a transitive verb) and P (the patient argument of a two-place transitive verb). 2 In this paper, I consider languages with alignment systems where S is sometimes treated like transitive ‘agents’, and sometimes like transitive ‘patients’ (Mithun 1991:511), depending on certain semantic features of the argument and/or its predicate. Such systems have been referred to as ‘unaccusative unergative’ (Perlmutter 1978), ‘split intransitive’ (Merlan 1985, Van Valin 1990), ‘split S’ (Dixon 1979), ‘agentive’, ‘Agent-Patient’, ‘StativeActive’ (Mithun 1991, Nichols 1987), and, more recently, ‘Semantic Alignment ’ (Wichmann, this volume). This paper introduces the Semantic Alignment systems from nine lesser-known Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken in eastern Indonesia. In some Semantic Alignment systems, the criterial semantic feature refers to the agentive or patientive characteristics of the participant (resulting in an ‘agent/patient’ system), in others, it is the inherent aspect of the predicate as state vs. event that crucially determines the alignment (resulting in an ‘active/stative’ system), yet other systems are based on participant’s semantics as well as inherent aspect of the predicate. Despite considerable variation in the grammatical