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Investigating Language Isolates: Typological and diachronic perspectives
Edited by Iker Salaberri, Dorota Krajewska, Ekaitz Santazilia and Eneko Zuloaga
[Typological Studies in Language 135] 2025
► pp. 71–102

An Austronesian-type voice system in an Amazonian isolate?

Comparing Movima and Tagalog

ORCID logo | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, SEDYL UMR
The paper discusses some typologically rare structural similarities between Movima, a South American isolate, and the Austronesian language Tagalog. Both languages have a symmetrical voice system, and in both languages verbs and nonpossessed common nouns are syntactically equivalent. For Tagalog, it has been argued that the system is due to a basically equational sentence pattern with a nominal predicate (the nominalist hypothesis), and this explanation is also plausible for Movima. In contrast to some accounts of Austronesian languages, however, there is no evidence of a nominalizing origin of the Movima voice markers. Thus, the discovery that a phenomenon so far considered unique to one language family also occurs in a linguistic isolate is evidence that rare phenomena can arise independently of an areal or genealogical relationship. At the same time, typological parallels between an isolate and a large well-studied family are an interesting source of diachronic hypotheses regarding an isolate language that lacks historical documentation.
Keywords: isolate language, direct-inverse, symmetrical voice, nominalist hypothesis, omnipredicativity
Article outline
  • 1.A Bolivian isolate and its parallels with an austronesian language
  • 2.Alignment patterns and extraction restrictions
    • 2.1Intransitive and transitive clauses
    • 2.2Two transitive clause patterns
    • 2.3Extraction restrictions
    • 2.4Summary
  • 3.Syntactic flexibility of nouns and verbs
    • 3.1Nouns and verbs as lexical categories
    • 3.2Nouns as main-clause predicates
    • 3.3Verbs in DPs
  • 4.A nominalist account for movima?
    • 4.1The nominalist hypothesis
    • 4.2Intransitive verbs
    • 4.3The direct marker ‑na as a nominalizer
  • 5.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Symbols and abbreviations (based on the Leipzig Glossing Rules)
  • References
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