Conditions on pronominal marking: Video P17- stand

This video is part of a set of 42 video stimuli designed to study to study variation in the
patterns of pronominal marking in the non-Austronesian languages of Alor and Pantar.
All of these languages share the typologically rare trait that they mark objects or
undergoers on the verbs, rather than subjects or actors (Siewierska 2011). However,
there is considerable within-group variation as to how this is done and also what the
relevant semantic parameters are which govern the indexation patterns. For instance,
Teiwa (Klamer 2010) aligns its arguments on a nominative-accusative basis indexing
the object of many (but not all) transitive verbs. The prime factor which determines
whether a verb indexes its object is animacy (Klamer and Kratochvíl 2006, Klamer
2010). Abui (Kratochvíl 2007, 2011), on the other hand, has a semantic alignment
system, in which the undergoer is marked on the verb. In intransitive clauses, more
undergoer-like arguments are indexed, e.g., ‘He is ill’, whereas more actor-like ones
are not, e.g., ‘He runs’. Animacy plays a role in the choice of prefix for undergoers
in Abui, but is not as important and pervasive as in Teiwa.

The stimulus set was created for the project 'Alor-Pantar languages: Origins and
theoretical impact', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
through European Science Foundation-EuroBabel.