Re: Is this a passive?

Estel Telcontar sikyal:

> 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.
Yivrian has one of these. It's called a "passive" in the grammar,
although I've started calling it an "inverse" in response to information
like what Thomas Weir provided in another post.

An interesting observation of my corpus was that this passive does not
pattern the same way that an English passive does, leading me to believe
that it really *isn't* a passive, but has some more subtle use.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"