If you are learning languages like Tagalog, you might have encountered this very term at some point, especially when we talk about how Tagalog sentences are constructed. This term can also go by several names, namely, the Austronesian alignment, the symmetrical voice, the Philippine-style voice system, and the Austronesian focus system. As the name might suggest, you would find this feature in the Austronesian languages. But not all of them.

From what I can gather from my reading and research, this alignment system pertains more towards transitive clauses or sentences, like “I buy the book”. In nominative-accusative languages, for example, there is only one way to form these sentence describing this precise relationship between “I”, “the book”, and the action of buying. But in symmetrical voice languages, there is more than one way to describe such a relationship.

Here, it would be appropriate to introduce the concept of grammatical voice. This pertains to the how the action or state described by the verb is related to the other arguments in the clause. There are two predominant voices, which are the active voice and the passive / patient voice. If the subject in the sentence is the agent or the performer of that action, the clause is said to be in the active voice (I bought the book). Conversely, if the subject in the sentence is the undergoer or patient of that action, the clause is said to be in the passive voice (The book is bought by me). Other kinds of grammatical voices do indeed exist, but for the purposes of this introduction, it would be be more appropriate to talk about the two grammatical voices one would normally see when using a certain language.

And so in languages using symmetrical voice, there is a marker that indicates the voice of the main verb, with which the word that plays the subject must agree with. In other words, if the main verb of a sentence or clause is marked as “active voice”, then the agent nominal phrase (basically the words forming the agent of a clause) must agree with it. Similarly, for a verb marked as a patient or passive voice, the patient nominal phrase (the words forming the patient of a clause) must agree with it. In a way, it does seem that the ‘symmetrical’ part here alludes towards the similar grammatical complexity of a sentence between active and patient voices, compared to other languages which might have to use ‘more complex expressions’ to express the patient or passive voice (‘I buy’ vs ‘is being bought by me’).

One possible implication of this is, the canonical word order may be different depending on the grammatical voice used. Tagalog, for instance, is strictly a verb-initial language, meaning that the verb must constitute the first element of a transitive clause at least. However, there are tendencies noted by linguists that the language tends towards when it comes to the order of the agent and patient. Compare the following Tagalog sentences, which both mean the same thing, but apply a different grammatical voice:

• bumili ng bigas ang lalaki.
• <AV>buy GEN rice DIR man
• binili ng lalaki ang bigas.
• <PV>buy GEN man DIR rice
• The man buys the rice.

While an oversimplification, and that there are other situations where word order may differ from the ones listed above, this example perhaps demonstrates how symmetrical voice occurs in Tagalog.

However, this is not all the grammatical voices Tagalog has. While it is true that Tagalog has an active voice and a patient voice, the patient voice forms just one of the three grammatical voices collectively grouped as a ‘goal voice’. The other two include the locative voice and the circumstantial voice. Locative voice focuses on a certain recipient, location, goal, or source of a certain action, while the circumstantial voice applies for everything else that could be considered a ‘goal’. There are affixes for each of the four grammatical voices in Tagalog, but not all verbs have all of these grammatical voices.

Active voice	-um-, mag- etc.
Patient voice	-in
Locative voice	-an
Circumstantial voice	i-

And so, as with the agreement between active voice and agent, and patient voice with the patient, the locative voice would have to agree with the word or phrase to be marked with the particle ang. This ang particle seems to mark the corresponding agent, patient, location / benefactor, or circumstance that agrees with the grammatical voice of the main verb.

However, there is one paper that proposes that the current analyses of Tagalog places too much emphasis on the transitive side of the symmetrical voice, and argues for the case of a ‘middle voice’, one that seems to occur in intransitive clauses, but in essence, aims to express some form of ‘self-oriented meaning’. In a way, this sounds like an example of an agent focus, which middle meaning disappears when more information is added to the sentence. Something like:

• B-um-angon si Roy.
• AV-get.up P.NOM Roy
• Roy got up.
• I-b-in-angon ni Roy ang anak niya.
• CV-get.up-RL P.GEN Roy NOM child 3SG.GEN
• Roy got his child up [from bed].

The concept of the middle voice is a pretty interesting one, one that provides a different approach when analysing Tagalog sentences for grammatical voice or focus. The paper will be linked in Further Reading should you be interested in learning more about it.

The symmetrical voice alignment is a comparatively rare feature, even more so than the ergative-absolutive alignment we have introduced a while back. Here, we can only find it in some Austronesian languages spoken in the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Madagascar. While Tagalog often appears as a popularly cited example of this particular alignment, related Austronesian languages like Bahasa Indonesia do not have such an alignment. Furthermore, such an alignment system has been identified in some languages spoken in Sudan and South Sudan, with most of them falling under the Nilotic languages.

When illustrating symmetrical voice, the most common example one would find is Tagalog. After all, it is a Western Austronesian, or Philippine language from which the term “Austronesian alignment” or “Philippine-style voice system” is derived. But languages spoken in Taiwan like Atayal and Amis also make use of such a system. This has led linguists to propose that the common ancestor of all Austronesian languages, proto-Austronesian, hypothetically originally spoken in Taiwan, once used symmetrical voice. This would be later be dropped in some Austronesian languages such as Malay and Indonesian.

So, this has been a little introduction to perhaps one of the more unusual systems you would see grouped together under the morphosyntactic alignment umbrella. One that requires the analysis by grammatical voice or focus depending on how the respective sentences are expressed or interpreted. Next time, we will take a look in more morphosyntactic alignments, one that occurs mainly in the indigenous languages of the Americas.

Further Reading

Andersen, T. (2015) ‘Syntacticized topics in Kurmuk: A ternary voice-like system in Nilotic’, Studies in Language, 39(3), pp. 508-554. doi:10.1075/sl.39.3.01and.

Garcia, R. and Kidd, E. (2020) ‘The Acquisition of the Tagalog Symmetrical Voice System: Evidence from Structural Priming’, Language Learning and Development, 16(4), pp. 399–425. doi: 10.1080/15475441.2020.1814780.

Haude, K. and Zúñiga, F. (2016) ‘Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions’, Linguistics, 54(3), pp. 443-481. doi:10.1515/ling-2016-0009.

Himmelmann, N. P. and Riesberg, S. (2013) ‘Symmetrical voice and applicative alterations: Evidence from Totoli’, Oceanic Linguistics, 52(2), pp. 396-422. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43286357.

Nagaya, N. (2009) ‘The Middle Voice in Tagalog’, Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 1, pp. 159-187.

Riesberg, S., Malcher, K. and Himmelmann, N. P. (2019) ‘How universal is agent-first? Evidence from symmetrical voice languages’, Language, 95(3), pp. 523-561. doi:10.1353/lan.2019.0055.