The role of -e and -agi 331
treat some of these as ‘possible, but odd’, sometimes distinctly so. More impor-
tantly, actual usage indicates that outside of causatives, verbs with -e and -agi
largely occur in object voice. That is, in the overwhelming majority of non-
causative cases, -e and -agi occur when a location, goal, beneficiary, instrument,
or subject matter argument is subject. This is comparable to the function of ac-
tor voice and object voice: they indicate what the thematic role of the subject is
or is not. In a similar way, in most instances -e and -agi actually serve to indi-
cate the role of the subject not the object. Textual evidence follows.
In connected discourse, such as the narrative texts in Chapter 16, the dis-
tribution of actor voice and object voice fluctuates between roughly 50/50 to a
40/60 split with object voice verbs predominating. For example, in the story Ke
Moko, the raw count in transitive clauses is 50 actor voice and 64 object voice,
roughly a 44/56 ratio. As the repeated use of a particular verb in a given text
may skew the results, this potentially confounding effect can be factored out by
considering only the number of distinct verbs used in each voice; in Ke Moko
doing so changes the counts to 27 actor voice and 41 object voice, roughly a
40/60 ratio. If use of -e and -agi were unrelated to subject selection, the ratio of
actor voice/object voice for -e and the ratio of actor voice/object voice for -agi
should be similar to the general actor voice/object voice ratio. In Ke Moko this
appears to be true of -e, which has a raw count of 4 actor voice and 5 object
voice. However, it is not true of -agi. Verbs with the -agi suffix occur in 1 actor
voice clause and 14 object voice clauses. Of the 15 tokens, 2 are causative, in-
cluding the lone instance of actor voice. Given the relatively small number of
tokens, any one text might not be representative. The results for an additional
three stories is given in (170), along with the results for Ke Moko.
(170) actor voice object voice -e -agiAV OV AV OVKe Moko 50 60 4 5 1 14Joko Tole 23 30 2 11 2 3Asal Molana
Nyamana...45 59 3 12 3 8
Siti Lalumba 49 57 1 4 1 5In the three additional stories, the actor voice/object voice ratio is similar to that
in Ke Moko. The numbers of -e and -agi verbs show more fluctuation. However,
the results taken together clearly indicate that a large majority of the -e and -agi