Lexical Mapping in Yami Verbs

This paper demonstrates that the ergative hypothesis works out for Yami, an indigenous language of Taiwan's Orchid Island, where actor voice verbs are either intransitive or antipassive while non-actor voice verbs may be transitive. Crucially, we contend that the so-called genitive voice, marked by no or ni, is in fact accusative. The account is rendered in the simplified LMT with a unified mapping principle proposed by Her (2012). The Intrinsic Classification pt/th → [-r] applies to accusative languages like English and Chinese but not to ergative languages like Yami. This minimal parameterization, plus the morphosyntactic classification of θ[voice] → θ[-r -o], for voice-marking languages like Yami, is sufficient to account for the basic patterns of lexical mapping in Yami verbs.