Re: Is this a passive?

> Date:    Tue, 22 Jul 2003 23:44:57 -0700
> From:    JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
> Subject: 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.
That is also very similar to how passives work in slaleg ekryn. The
subject and the object simply flip from either side of the verb. The big
difference is that the "object" in slaleg ekryn is always what would be
termed in English to be the indirect object. The direct object for both
active and passive verbs is always an oblique as a subclause of the
verb. There are two other types of verbs, reverse active and reverse
passive, used to bring the direct object into the subjects place. The
reverse verbs also allow you to retain the original subject in the same
subclause that the direct object formerly existed.