158 Chapter 6 Clause types
(50) Ale' labu dhari korse.
yngr.sibling fall from chair
‘Little Brother fell from the chair.’
(51) Bengko-na Bu Marhamah robbu.
house-DEF Mrs Marhamah collapse
‘Bu Marhamah’s house collapsed.’
(52) Buku-na elang.
book-DEF disappear
‘The book is lost.’
Like adjectival predicates, noncontrolled dynamic intransitive verbs take no
voice marking; thus kerem ‘sink’, labu ‘fall’, robbu ‘collapse’, and elang ‘dis-
appear’ occur in clauses in their root form. Other verbs in this class include:
ambu ‘stop’, dhapa' ‘arrive’, dhateng ‘come’, entar ‘go’, gaggar ‘fall’ (for
inanimate objects), maso' ‘enter’, molae ‘begin’, mole ‘go home’, tedhung
‘sleep’, and toju' ‘sit (down)’. Stative intransitives share with these verbs lack
of control by the subject over the state of affairs described by the predicate as
well as lack of voice marking. In many languages, this lack of control is charac-
teristic of unaccusative predicates (Perlmutter and Postal 1984; Levin and Rap-
paport Hovav 1995). One might, therefore, take the lack of voice morphology as
a diagnostic of unaccusativity in Madurese.
Dynamic intranstive verbs which imply that the subject controls the ac-
tion are exemplified in (53-56).
(53) Na'-kana' rowa a-berka' ka toko.
RED-child that AV-run to store
‘Those kids ran to the store.’
(54) Guru-na ng-oca'.
teacher-DEF AV-speak
‘The teacher spoke.’
(55) Sengko' a-langngoy e tase'.
I AV-swim at sea
‘I swim in the sea.’
(56) Malem-ma Bapa' a-lako.
night-DEF father AV-work
‘Last night Father worked.’
Each of the verbs in (53-56) takes actor voice morphology, either a- or ng-.