Divehi to Malagasy: the final participant need not be the person performing the action
Recover the source roles before following target order
Gnanadesikan distinguishes Divehi active sentences from inactive constructions, including a contrast between entrusting something and being entrusted with it. The change affects which participant the sentence presents as subject. A target cannot preserve that distinction by assigning actor status to whichever personal name occupies a familiar position.
A recent Malagasy voice study by Keenan, Ralalaoherivony and Fils Ranaivoson compares several offering constructions. The person offering, the rice offered, the guest receiving it and the dish used retain their semantic roles across the variants. The final subject position can correspond to different roles according to the verb’s voice construction.
Thus a Divehi report naming a giver and recipient can legitimately place different participants at the end of Malagasy alternatives. The final person is not automatically the giver. Read the target verb form together with the participants before deciding who transferred what to whom. A sentence can preserve its people yet reverse the event if their roles are guessed from position alone.
A command can use a non-active voice form
Keenan and Manorohanta’s earlier quantitative study illustrates Malagasy imperative contrasts involving served rice and guests receiving rice. The imperative distinction tracks voice and participant selection, rather than forcing every instruction into one active form. Its short Rosó+y vary izy requests serving rice to a person; the nominative person is the recipient in that construction.
For a Divehi instruction, preserve that it is an instruction as well as who should receive the item. A Malagasy form analyzed as non-active need not turn the command into a completed passive statement. The target construction combines mood with voice; those are separate grammatical dimensions.
The quantitative study also finds frequent non-active predicates with expressed agents in its Malagasy texts. A non-active target should consequently not be rejected simply because the Divehi source explicitly names the person acting. The agent can remain part of the target event even when another participant has the final subject role.
Case-like forms can identify an agent rather than an owner
The earlier study distinguishes Malagasy nominative, accusative and genitive pronoun series. It uses genitive forms for agents in non-active constructions as well as for possessors, illustrated by ny trano+ko for my house. A target element resembling an ownership form can therefore identify who performed the action, depending on the construction.
Divehi likewise has its own ways of expressing an agent in an inactive sentence. Gnanadesikan describes an at-the-hand expression, with a range of uses, rather than one universal marker whose shape predicts every Malagasy counterpart. Recover the source actor before interpreting a target genitive as ownership.
The newer Malagasy paper separately notes that predicates do not agree with arguments in person, number or gender. A target verb need not reproduce Divehi person marking to retain its participants. In this direction, grammatical role, semantic role and agreement must be evaluated separately: the recipient can occupy a subject position, the agent can have a genitive form, and the action can remain an instruction throughout.
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