The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese

Journal article

Abstract:: In Balinese, a noncanonical passive construction exists alongside the canonical passive. This noncanonical form shares some properties with the canonical passive but differs in key ways, particularly in expressing an unintentional agent. This study explores this construction, similar to the English get passive, by compiling a corpus of Balinese passives from storybooks and conducting grammaticality judgment tests. Results reveal that the ka- passive is incompatible with agent-oriented adverbials and purposive clauses, and contrasts semantically with the -a passive, which marks accomplishments. The ka- passive, associated with achieved states in Austronesian languages, often appears as a high-register or polite form, suggesting its (non)canonical status is gradient due to language change.

Files:: Udayana_et_al_2025_The_(non)canonical_status.pdf

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Publisher:: De Gruyter
Journal:: Linguistics Vanguard: A Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences More from this journal
Volume:: 11
Issue:: 1
Pages:: 103-117
Publication date:: 2025-04-11
Acceptance date:: 2025-01-28
DOI:: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0122
EISSN:: 2199-174X

Language:: English
Keywords:: ka- passive

-a passive

achievement

accomplishment

language change
Pubs id:: 2117889
Local pid:: pubs:2117889
Deposit date:: 2025-04-14
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_1db28f512c3b4fc9be3c85b241f420b3

Copyright holder:: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Notes:: The author accepted manuscript (AAM) of this paper has been made available under the University of Oxford's Open Access Publications Policy, and a CC BY public copyright licence has been applied.

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