Javanese passives, ergatives and adversatives

This paper describes Javanese passive, ergative and adversative constructions. Even though the passive in Javanese, as in other Austronesian languages, does not have the same pragmatic properties as the passive in English and other European languages, Javanese seems to have genuine syntactic passive constructions. Recently, Verhaar (1988) has claimed that some Indonesian passives are in fact ergative, and extends his claim to Javanese. However, Davies (1990) suggests that Eastern Javanese is best accounted for by the use of passive analysis, hence rejecting an ergative analysis of Javanese. He further uses the passive analysis to describe Javanese adversatives (Davies 1995). I argue here that apart from having a passive construction, Javanese has another construction which can be analysed as ergative on the basis of properties of its agent and markedness. Further, the passive analysis is argued to be insufficient to account for the different types of Javanese adversatives