The rise and fall of semantic alignment in North Halmahera, Indonesia

Among the non-Austronesian languages of Eastern Indonesia one commonly finds pronominal systems which exhibit more than one morphological pattern for indexing single arguments of intransitive verbs. In such languages core arguments are semantically aligned. That is, the two patterns for marking the single argument of an intransitive verb are distinguished not only formally, but also semantically. Active or agentive arguments follow one pattern, while stative or patientive arguments follow another. As the chapters in this volume attest, such semantically aligned systems are clearly not restricted to Eastern Indonesia or even to nonAustronesian languages. However, they are common enough in the region to lead Donohue (2004b) to propose semantic alignment as an areal tendency in Eastern Indonesia. Within this region semantic alignment cuts across genetic boundaries, occurring in genetically unrelated languages and realized to differing degrees within closely related languages. This distributional pattern begs the question of how semantically aligned systems arise, and vice versa, how non-semantically aligned systems arise from originally semantically aligned ones. Evidence of both types of evolutionary development is presented here. The North Halmaheran languages of North Maluku provide an interesting laboratory in which to examine the evolution of semantic alignment. Although