Toba Batak voice #

Toba Batak (Austronesian; Lake Toba, Sumatra) is predicate-initial and has two voices, the actor voice in mang-, with its phonologically conditioned variants, and the object voice in di-, as in Manjaha buku si Poltak and Dijaha si Poltak buku, both 'Poltak read the book'. Each voice makes one argument the pivot, the clause-peripheral subject, and neither demotes the other core argument: the agent of the object voice remains a core term, so the system is symmetric like those of the neighbouring Malayic languages, though the Austronesianist literature calls the voices active and passive. Among the core arguments only the pivot can be extracted, while obliques extract under either voice; the restriction is the subject-only gap relativizer of Relativization.lean, and the voice inventory says which argument the pivot is. The voice prefix surfaces in every clause, so it is not a reflex of extraction, and neither voice is morphologically basic. Analyses of the extraction restriction, and the examples that support them, live in the studies that propose them.