Also known as symmetrical voice, Austronesian alignment is predominant in many Austronesian languages (i.e. Tagalog, the Puyuma language, Amis, Atayal, Mayrinax, Hla’alua, and many others).

Austronesian alignment is a special type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the relationships between the nouns and the focus of a sentence are marked or “triggered” by a particular verb form. Let’s first clarify what morphosyntactic alignment is.

In most languages, there is a specific type of morphosyntactic alignment. This refers to how the roles of nouns are categorized. This is related to transitive and intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs require two nouns: an agent (the “doer” of the action) and a patient (the receiver of the action). Intransitive verbs only have a subject.

For example:
Intransitive sentence: The boy sits.
Transitive sentence: The boy throws the ball.

In order to distinguish between the roles of the boy in the first sentence, the boy in the second sentence, and the ball in the second sentence, we have to figure out a way to sort them. The two most common ways are called nominative-accusative alignment (which English uses) and ergative alignment.

In nominative-accusative alignment, the boy in both sentences has the same role as the “doer” of the action. And in this example, that makes sense. Ergative alignment would group the boy in the first sentence and the ball in the second sentence as the same role. If this seems weird, let’s examine another example.

Intransitive: The glass broke.
Transitive: The boy broke the glass.

It makes sense to group the glass from both sentences in the same role, because in both examples it is not really “doing” anything.

This type of grouping of nouns is called morphosyntactic alignment.

Austronesian alignment however, is a very special form of morphosyntactic alignment found in Austronesian languages. Instead of having a specific alignment for an entire language, it varies in each sentence based on a verb form. If you are familiar with grammatical cases, this verb form is almost assisting with the job of the cases (to define a noun’s role). Essentially, the relationship between the nouns is determined by the form or “trigger” of the verb. Let’s revisit one of our previous examples.

The boy threw the ball.

In this example, we know that it is the boy who threw the ball, and not the ball who threw the boy because of word order (an English quality). But in a language that uses Austronesian alignment, we would know what threw what by the form of the verb. Every sentence has a noun that is marked as the “focus”. If the verb signified the active or agent trigger (and the boy was the focus), then we would know the boy threw the ball. If the verb signified the passive or patient trigger (and the boy was the focus), then we would know that the boy was thrown by the ball. If this is really confusing, don’t worry! It’s a very complicated topic and this is more of an oversimplification. For a more detailed explanation, see Stacy Fang-Ching Teng. 2008. A Reference Grammar of Puyuma, an Austronesian Language of Taiwan.

In Puyuman Nanwang (the dialect we are focusing on), there are two types of triggers. The active or agent trigger signifies the subject or doer of the verb. The second trigger is the undergoer trigger, which has three variants: the patient (which signifies that the noun in focus is the patient of the verb), the instrumental (which signifies that the noun in focus is used as an instrument for the verb/action), and the circumstantial (which signifies that the noun is describing the circumstance of the action such as location).