https://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/main/zh-tw?/sign/0803 The loss of verbal voice marking in younger-generation Kaxabu 日期：2026-08-03（一）14:00~16:00 主講人：林鴻瑞 博士後研究學者 會議地點：中央研究院人文社會科學館(南棟5樓519會議室) 摘要 Pazeh-Kaxabu is a moribund Formosan language of central Taiwan with two dialects, Pazeh and Kaxabu. This talk focuses on Kaxabu. Since the 2010s, I have conducted fieldwork on Kaxabu and found clear intergenerational differences. In my doctoral dissertation (Lim 2023), I distinguished two generations of Kaxabu speakers: an older generation (approximately 85 years and above) and the so-called “younger generation” (approximately 75–84 years old), based on their ages in 2020. The reason why I made this generational distinction is because I found out there are variations in phonology and morphosyntax. The present talk adds up to some observations I have made elsewhere (Lim 2023), and specifically focus on voice morphology. Philippine-type Austronesian languages are well known for their elaborate voice systems, in which verbal morphology plays a central role in grammatical alignment and clause structure. This talk examines a loss of verbal voice marking in “younger-generation” Kaxabu. Based on a corpus of 46 natural narrative texts produced by Giok-sim Tsu (1936– 2023), the talk shows that dynamic verbs frequently occur without the actor voice prefix mu-, resulting in bare verb stems in declarative clauses. Comparison with conservative Pazeh and older-generation Kaxabu further demonstrates that this development reflects a gradual restructuring process involving the reduction of voice distinctions across generations. The analysis reveals that some verbs still retain the actor voice prefix mu-, whereas others occur predominantly in bare form, and that the presence or absence of voice marking no longer serves any clear morphosyntactic contrast. The talk further proposes three interacting factors contributing to this development: functional reduction within the voice system, contact with Taiwanese Southern Min, and prosodic preference for disyllabic word structure. Taken together, the findings provide a new case for the reduction of verbal voice marking in a Philippine-type Formosan language and shed light on morphosyntactic change under conditions of language shift and intensive contact. --

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