The development of the English-type passive in Balinese

Abstract

The morpheme -a in Balinese is ambiguous between the third person enclitic pronoun and a passive voice marker. Different views exist as to whether the morpheme can be the pronoun in the presence of a teken agentive phrase. This paper argues that it can and that the construction in which the pronoun -a and a teken phrase co-occur (the hybrid type) is an instance of clitic doubling. A hypothesis is proposed about how the third person pronoun changed into a passive marker and how different passive subtypes came into existence. It is claimed that the hybrid type played a key role in the change. The hybrid type supports the analysis of passives in general as a clitic doubling construction (Baker, Johnson and Roberts 1989). A clitic doubling analysis of passives enables a new typology of passives whereby passives are classified according to how the clitic and its double in a passive clause are expressed.