The Hawaiian passive: A neural network simulation

The passive provides arguably the most famous dataset in Polynesian linguistics. While most explorations of the passive over the past 40 years have been framed in terms of Hale’s (1968) phonological and morphological analyses, we instead frame the Hawaiian passive in terms of a word-based analysis. As Parker Jones (2008) has done for New Zealand Maori, we model passivization in Hawaiian as a mapping from active verbs to passive verbs in a feed-forward neural network. Unlike Maori, the Hawaiian passive exhibits productivity for multiple categories with thematic consonants. By scrutinizing the model, we conclude that passivization in Hawaiian is exemplar-driven.