354 Chapter 11 Complex sentences
(83) a. Ali nyoba' ma-becce’ sapedha motor-ra bi’ obing.
Ali AV.try AV.CS-good motorcycle-DEF with screwdriver
‘Ali tried to fix his motorcycle with a screwdriver.’
b. Sapedha motor-ra e-coba' e-pa-becce' Ali bi' obing.
motorcycle-DEF OV-try OV-CS-good Ali with screwdriver
‘Ali tried to fix his motorcycle with a screwdriver.’
In (82b) and (83b), the predicates of the complement clauses are obligatorily in
the object voice. With coba' ‘try’, the matrix verb must also be in object voice;
with terro ‘want’, there is no such requirement as the verb occurs with no voice
marking.These structures are often referred to as ‘crossed control’ because the
agent of both verbs occurs in the embedded clause rather than the matrix clause.
Crossed control has been resported in Indonesian (Polinsky and Potsdam 2008,
Davies and Kurniawan 2010), Javanese (Polinsky and Postdam 2008), Malay
(Nomoto 2008), Sundanese (Davies and Kurniawan 2010), and many others.
This distinguishes these predicates from verbs such as endha' ‘be willing’, enga'
‘remember’, and others with which a complement object may not occur in the
matrix subject position.
(84) a. Eppa' endha' magi pesse-na ka na'-kana' se lapar.
father willing AV.give money-DEF to RED-child REL hungry
‘Father was willing to give money to the hungry child.’
b. *Pesse-na endha' e-bagi Eppa' ka na'-kana' se lapar.
money-DEF willing OV-give father to RED-child REL hungry
‘Father was willing to give money to the hungry child.’
5. Aspectual predicates
Another category of predicates that require coreference and disallow comple-
ments with the complementizers can be roughly (but imperfectly) characterized
as aspectual predicates. This class includes ambu ‘stop’, asel ‘succeed’, burung
‘fail’, kenneng ‘get’, molae ‘start’, terros ‘continue’, and others, illustrated in
(85) and (86).
(85) Ina molae maca sorad-da Ebu'.
Ina start AV.read letter-DEF mother
‘Ina started to read Mother’s letter.’