Re: Is this a passive?

Quoting Estel Telcontar <estel_telcontar@...>:

> 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 formulation in (2) is not really how it works. The notion of
"subject" is a *relation* between thematic roles.  In an accusative
language like English, the subject is a relation that marks the single
argument of intransitive verbs and the agent of transitive verbs in
the same way.  What a passive construction does is that it
detransitivizes a transitive verb, taking that transitive's patient
and making it the single argument of the new intransitive verb. This
has the indirect effect of making it the subject, but the subject
as such is not deleted or otherwise missing.

> 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.
This sounds vaguely like a kind of inversion marker, flipping the
topicality marking, rather than a passive.

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