Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Austronesian voice has been claimed to originate in an ancient reanalysis of participant nominalization as matrix clause predicates. A survey of participant nominalization as a relativizing strategy reveals that Austronesian voice has many analogues throughout the world that show certain typological hallmarks such as apparently null-headed relative clauses, genitive marked agents and a lack of dedicated relativizers and copulas. Many Austronesian languages maintain remnants of the original verbal forms alongside the nominalized forms that took over main clause functions in most languages. New observations about the case assignment properties of these forms in several Philippine languages strengthen the argument that they remain as a distinct verbal syntactic category in modern languages, in comparison to the participle-like forms stemming from nominalization.</jats:p>