Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2026.
“Atayalic subjects and the nature of nominative.”
Presented at GLOW 48.
The Atayalic languages of Taiwan exhibit a so-called “voice system” characteristic of many Austronesian languages: in each clause, one nominal (here called the “subject”) appears in a particular case (“nominative”) and verbal voice morphology cross-references the choice of subject. In this talk, I develop a new analysis for such voice alternations as involving removal of the subject’s K layer. I motivate the proposal with two sets of previously underappreciated facts: nominative case is structurally smaller than non-nominatives — in Atayalic as well as in many other Philippine-type languages — and certain non-subjects can bear nominative case in Atayalic, based in part on original fieldwork on Squliq Atayal.