Voice 255
tako' ‘afraid’ nako'e ‘scare’
busen ‘bored’ mosenne ‘bored with’
enga' ‘remember’ ngenga'e ‘remember (tr)’
gaggar ‘fall’ ngaggari ‘fall on’
tedhung ‘sleep’ ngedhunge ‘sleep with’
Thus, despite the fact that both a- and ng- indicate actor voice, they are not se-
mantically identical.
1.1.2 The unaccusative/unergative split
As suggested in Chapter 6 section 4.1, the distinction between those intransitive
verbs requiring actor voice morphology and those that do not generally accords
with the unergative/unaccusative distinction first proposed by Perlmutter and
Postal (1984) and generally adopted in linguistic theory since. Although the
correlation is imperfect, in general terms unergative predicates are cross-
linguistically agentive/volitional and unaccusatives nonagentive/nonvolitional,
the distribution found in Madurese. But the preciseness of this system appears
challenged by a number of seemingly agentive verbs that take no voice mor-
phology, verbs such as buru ‘run’, dhapa' ‘arrive’, dhateng ‘come’, entar ‘go’,
maso' ‘enter’, mole ‘go home’, and others, two of which are illustrated in (17)
and (18).
(17) Maleng-nga maso' dha' roma-na Pa' Rahman.
thief-DEF enter to house-DEF Mr Rahman
‘The thief entered Pak Rahman’s house.’
(18) Atin mole jam petto'.
A go.home hour seven
‘Atin went home at seven o’clock.’
At first blush, this might appear to undermine the agentive/nonagentive distinc-
tion, which seems to correlate with the presence or absence of actor voice mor-
phology on intransitives. However, as Arka (2003) points out for Balinese, in
the main, those motion predicates which lack actor voice morphology are verbs
of directed motion, e.g., ‘come’, ‘go’, rather than verbs of manner of motion,
e.g., ‘run’, ‘dance’. It has been suggested that directed motion predicates are
unaccusative while manner of motion verbs are unergative (Hoekstra 1984,
Levin and Hovav Rappaport 1995). If this is the correct analysis, then the see-
mingly exceptional verbs should be classified as unaccusatives, and the crucial
factor is unergative vs. unaccusative rather than agentive/volitional vs. nonagen-