Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons^™

The Development Of The English-Type Passive In Balinese, Hiroki Nomoto

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

The morpheme -a in Balinese is ambiguous because it can serve as a third person enclitic pronoun or a passive voice marker. Various views exist about whether the morpheme can be a pronoun in the presence of a teken agentive phrase. This paper argues that it can and that the construction in which the pronoun -a and a teken phrase co-occur (the hybrid type) is an instance of clitic doubling. A hypothesis about how the third person pronoun became a passive marker and how various passive sub-types came into existence is proposed. It is claimed that the hybrid type played …