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The so-called passive of Acehnese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Mark Durie
Mark Durie*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Abstract

The Mon Tasiek dialect of Acehnese (Indonesia) was analysed by Lawler 1977 as having a passive in which the verb agrees with the initial, or underlying, subject. His argument was that the preverbal NP in Acehnese has the expected properties of a surface subject, but that verb agreement was controlled by the underlying subject—which, in ‘passive’ clauses, is not the preverbal NP. This analysis was based on limited and unrepresentative data. In the light of more extensive data, Lawler's claim that the preverbal NP in Acehnese acts as a final subject does not hold. The most obvious—and, for syntactic theory, the least problematic conclusion—is that the so-called ‘underlying’ subject is in fact a surface grammatical relation; Acehnese has no passive, and its verbal agreement is a surface phenomenon.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , March 1988, pp. 104 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

* My thanks go to the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, the Lembaga Bahasa of Universitas Syiah Kuala, and the Australian National University, for support—moral and administrative—during two field trips to Aceh over the course of 14 months in 1980-83. The principal purpose of that research was to produce a grammar of Acehnese, published as Durie 1985. My thanks to Judith Aissen, Sandra Chung, Geoffrey Pullum, and Sandra Thompson for their helpful criticisms.

The writing of this paper was supported in part by NSF grant BNS-85 19708 (University of California, Santa Cruz).

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