Undergoer orientation in Movima

This article explores the system of verbal voice morphemes in Movima (unclassified, Amazonian Bolivia) and seeks to explain why most transitive main clauses in Movima pattern ergatively. Movima has two basic transitive constructions, direct and inverse, overtly distinguished by verbal morphemes. In main clauses, the direct construction patterns ergatively and the inverse construction patterns accusatively. In terms of statistical frequency, the large majority of transitive main clauses in texts is direct, i.e. ergative. The direct and inverse markers, which are employed according to the relative position of the participants on a referential hierarchy, belong to a paradigm of verbal morphemes (reflexive/reciprocal, resultative, agentive, middle) that indicate the transitivity of the verb and the participant role (actor or undergoer) of its subject. The proposal of this paper is to consider the direct voice marker as a morpheme that derives a transitive verb by simply adding a syntactic position for an actor argument, leaving the undergoer orientation of the verb untouched and thus creating an ergative structure. The inverse marker, under this view, is a secondary derivation, reversing the participant roles of the arguments of a transitive clause according to the referential hierarchy and discourse status