54 ROBERT D. VAN VALIN, JR.
b. Lôn seunang-até.
ISG happy-liver
"I am happy."
c. Ka lôn-tët rumoh gopnyan.
IN ISG Α-burn house 3SG
"I burned her house."
d. Gopnyan ka lôn-tët-rumoh.
3SG IN ISG A-burn-house
"I burned her house," or "She had her house burned by
me.
e. *Gopnyan ka aneuk-woe.
3SG IN child-return
"His/her child returned."
(35) a. Awak nyan ka ku-poh(*-jih) maté{-jih).
person that IN lsGA-strike(-3u) dead(-3u)
"I struck that person dead."
b. *Ji-meulhö maté{-jih).
3A-fight die(-3u)
"They fought to the death."
The occurrence of a possessor NP {Ion in 34a,b) outside of the possessive
NP {até Ion in 34a) is possible only if the possessive NP functions as the
undergoer of the clause; as (34e) shows, this is not possible when the pos
sessive NP serves as actor. In the resultative construction in (35), the under
goer clitic of the first verb is omitted under identity with that of the second;
again, this is possible only if the identical arguments are undergoers. Other
constructions sensitive to the actor-undergoer contrast are verb doublets
and reflexivization; see Durie (1987) for detailed discussion.
Several major constructions are sensitive only to whether the argument
in question is a core argument, e.g. NP fronting, raising, and relativization;
it makes no difference whether the argument is actor, undergoer or what
Durie labels a "dative argument". Here the actor-undergoer opposition is
indeed neutralized, but it is not a restricted neutralization, like the one
from English regarding verb agreement discussed above. That is, the Eng
lish neutralization nullifies the actor-undergoer contrast with intransitive
verbs only, and it applies only to macrorole arguments; it is not a general
neutralization, in that macrorole arguments are still singled out for special