Open Access

Nikolaus P. Himmelmann

• This contribution is concerned with prefixed forms in western Austronesian languages which have been called a wide variety of names including 'stative', 'accidental', 'involuntary', 'potential', 'coincidence', 'momentary', and so on. Although widely neglected in the literature, these formations are of major import to the grammar of many western Austronesian languages, where for all event expressions there is an obligatory choice between a neutral form and a form marked for 'involuntariness', 'potentiality', 'coincidence', or the like. Furthermore, this distinction has implications for a wide range of theoretical issues, including the nature of unaccusativity and causativity, split-intransitivity, and the grammar of control and complementation. The main goal of this contribution is to bring some basic order to the fairly broad and, on first sight at least, somewhat heterogeneous range of uses and meanings associated with these forms. I will argue that the different uses can be grouped into two semantically and morphosyntactically quite different construction types, which I will call STATIVE (proper) and POTENTIVE, respectively. Section 2 presents the major uses of the 'stative' prefix ma- in Tagalog. In section 3, it is shown that despite superficial similarities the various examples with ma-marked predicates presented in section 2 involve two different constructions and that the prefix ma- belongs to two different morphological paradigms. Section 4, finally, provides a systematization of stative and potentive uses and discusses similarities and differences between the Tagalog system and superficially similar systems in so-called split-S languages.