So Where Are All Those Prototypical Indonesian-Type Voice Systems? An Exploration of Clause Structure in Mentawai

Austronesian languages are renowned for their highly developed voice systems, but also for a considerable amount of internal diversity with respect to these systems. Within Austronesian, one important type of voice system, sometimes referred to as "Indonesian-type " (e.g. Arka and Ross 2005:7), involves a basic opposition between two voices, active and passive, distinguished by verbal prefixes, with the additional proviso that — unlike typical active/passive oppositions elsewhere — active and passive clauses exhibit similar syntactic stucture, that is to say, the passive voice does not involve the demotion of a core argument to oblique position. Of course, many of the languages of Indonesia do not exhibit the Indonesian-type voice system. In northern Sulawesi, some languages have a voice system closer to the Philippine type; in Nusa Tenggara and elsewhere, many languages have a periphrastic passive resembling the standard European type; while in West Papua, some of the Austronesian languages are entirely lacking in an active/passive distinction. Still, the general assumption is that in the western part of the archipelago, at least, the Indonesian-type voice system, as exemplified (perhaps not by chance) with Standard Indonesian, i