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Re: Is this a passive?

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Wednesday, July 23, 2003, 0:16
Estel Telcontar wrote:
> > I have a morpheme in mind for one of my languages, and I'm wondering if > it counts as a passive. As far as I understand, passive normally > > (1) promotes the direct object to subject > (2) a. deletes the subject > OR > b. demotes the subject to an oblique > > The morpheme I'm thinking of is okay on (1) and (2)a. : The original > direct object becomes the subject, and the original subject can be > omitted. It's in (2)b. that the question comes in: if the original > subject is still expressed, it is expressed as a direct object, not as > an oblique.
I'd certainly call it a passive, tho one with a rather unusual way of expressing the agent. That could, perhaps, be explained diachronically by an earlier sound change that collapsed the accusative with another oblique case, such as instrumental or genitive. In fact, as I mentioned in the thread about Monster Raving Loony Languages (re: verbs? on July 17), the past tense in Old Iranian was derived from a passive, but, due to a merger of the accusative and genitive cases, the agent was expressed with the oblique case and the patient with the nominative case. Later the patient became marked with the oblique as well, creating the phenomenon wherein, for past tense verbs, the subject of an intransitive is marked one way, and both the subject and object of a transitive are marked another way. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42

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Joe <joe@...>