Determiner removal in Balinese nonpivot agents

Abstract

Patient-voice clauses within the symmetric voice sys-tem of Balinese disallow any extraction from the external-argument position, while definite external arguments are blocked from occurring altogether. The former fact is traditionally taken as evidence for syntactic ergativity in Austronesian. The latter fact has recently been argued to provide evidence for postsyn-tactic case licensing via adjacency with the verb. In this article, we offer a simple alternative explanation for the in-situ properties of patient-voice agents in Balinese—one that does not make reference to case. We argue that patient-voice heads come with a feature that triggers removal of the external argument’s DP shell, resulting in the loss of a determiner and a category-D feature that would otherwise enable extraction.