Voice and focus system in Penan and Kenyah languages of East Kalimantan

This paper focuses on the morphosyntactic features of some Borneo languages spoken in East Kalimantan belonging to different branches of the North Borneo phylum, mainly Kenyah, Kayan, Penan Benalui, Punan Tubu’ and Punan Malinau. I present a description of the morphosyntax of Kenyah, Penan Benalui, Punan Tubu’ and Punan Malinau languages from naturalistic and elicited data and also use some secondary source data from Kayan and Kelabit to shed light on the typological morphosyntactic features of the area for the expression of focus and voice comparing the way grammatical relations are marked and the way actor focus and undergoer focus contrast is expressed. As pointed out by Claire (1996), the voice system in Bornean languages is much reduced in comparison to the Philippine-type languages. Indeed there is a wide range of voice systems, from very complex ones like in some languages in Sabah where ablaut, affixation, nominal marking and word order play a relevant role, to much simpler systems like Kenyah and Kayan and Punan Malinau where a very simple morphological process is employed and only personal pronouns and word order play a role. Penan Benalui and Punan Tubu’ employ the -EN- infixation to mark the undergoer voice, and fall in the middle of this range of voice systems whereas Kenyah, Kayan and Punan Malinau seem to have lost the system or probably never developed it. In Penan Benalui and Punan Tubu’ the undergoer focus is productively marked by the -EN- infix although few examples with bare verbs have been recorded. In most Kenyah languages there is no specific passive morphology, but thematic roles are expressed pragmatically or analytically through the word order or the use of specific words. Similarly in Kayan and Punan Malinau, a particle en or in is employed in undergoer focus sentences or simply word order. As a conclusion I try to answer questions on how these languages relate to each other and to other languages in the area in the reflex of the Proto-Austronesian infix -IN- marking simultaneously voice and aspect, how we interpret the lack of the undergoer voice markers in Kenyah and Kayan and whether it is possible to use morphosyntactic features to define subgroupings.