What is it about?
This chapter discusses grammatical relations (GRs) in Balinese (ISO 639-3: ban, Austronesian, spoken by ~3 million, mainly in Bali, Indonesia). It is demonstrated that Balinese typologically shows relational properties typical for the Indonesian type of Austronesian languages, in terms of voice marking, argument marking, GR alternations, and other related processes such as relativisation, reflexivisation and control. In a wider typological context, Balinese shows splitS in terms of verbal morphology. Syntactically the overall grammar of Balinese shows a symmetrical alignment system: actor (A) and patient (P) arguments of transitive verbs can be equally selected as the grammatical subject or Pivot without the demotion of the other. In addition to voice morphology (showing AV, UV, and middle alternations), Balinese also has applicative and causative morphology, which is good evidence that semantic roles and surface grammatical relations are organised as two distinct layers in the grammar. It is demonstrated in this chapter that much of Balinese syntax revolves around the notion of the privileged argument of Pivot, and its related morphosyntactic and morphosemantic properties in the voice system, in both simple and complex structures; e.g. in clausal argument with/without control and adverbial clauses. We start with the distinction between grammatical relations and grammatical functions (section 2), followed by the selecting properties of Pivot (section 3). Balinese grammar also exhibits a set of properties distinguishing core arguments from obliques, discussed in sections 4 and 5. Three-place predicates are discussed in section 6. It is shown that Balinese exhibits a secundative alignment. Adjuncts are very similar to obliques but they are different in certain respects (section 7). Clausal dependants (complements and adverbial clauses) are discussed in sections 8-9. A conclusion is given in section 10.