Symmetrical voice

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Symmetrical voice, also known as Austronesian alignment or the Austronesian focus system, is a typologically unusual kind of morphosyntactic alignment in which "one argument can be marked as having a special relationship to the verb". This special relationship manifests itself as a voice affix on the verb that corresponds to the syntactic role of a noun within the clause, that is either marked for a particular grammatical case or is found in a privileged structural position within the clause or both. There are two alignment types of languages with symmetrical voice: the Philippine type, which mostly retains the original system from Proto-Austronesian with four voices (or sometimes three), and the Indonesian type, which reduced them into only two voices. The Philippine-type languages include languages of the Philippines, but is also found in Taiwan's Formosan languages, as well as in northern Borneo, northern Sulawesi, and Madagascar, and has been reconstructed for the ancestral Proto-Austronesian...

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