Voice Choice in Äiwoo and the Symmetrical Voice-to-Transitivity Shift

This paper examines the factors that influence the choice between actor voice and undergoer voice in the Oceanic language Äiwoo from two perspectives: a quantitative study comparing 80 actor-voice clauses with 80 undergoer-voice clauses and a qualitative study looking at all occurrences of actor voice in the available data. The results show, on the one hand, that the factors influencing voice choice in Äiwoo largely overlap with those described for symmetrical voice languages in the western Austronesian region. On the other hand, the usage patterns of the actor voice also show affinities with the transitivity alternations found in canonical Oceanic languages: the undergoer voice is by far the most frequent in discourse, suggesting that it may be on its way to being reanalyzed as the default transitive construction, and the predominant context for the use of the actor voice is with an undergoer argument that is low in referentiality, similar to the contexts that favor “semi-transitive” constructions in many Oceanic languages. The Äiwoo data thus point to a possible path of reanalysis from a symmetrical voice system to an Oceanic-type system of transitivity alternations.