The syntax of voice and case in Yami, an Austronesian language of Taiwan

Abstract

Yami is an highly endangered Malayo-Polynesian language spoken on Orchid Island, a small island off the southeast coast of Taiwan. It possesses a system of Philippine-type voice and a conservative four-way case system. This dissertation examines the voice and case systems in Yami with a particular focus on distributional properties of the four different voice forms and the syntactic properties of case-marked elements in the clause. This is predominantly a descriptive work that seeks to provide more fine-grained empirical data on the instantiation of Philippine-type voice and case in Yami.