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Re: Vjatjackwa (the result of all those sound changes!)

From:Garth Wallace <gwalla@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 16, 2003, 1:54
Roger Mills wrote:
> Amanda Babcock wrote: > >>Applicatives promote an oblique argument of the verb to the direct >>object position. I do not think they are restricted to intransitive >>verbs, although the things I'm calling "applicatives" in Witicku will >>be. Basically, they change the meaning of the verb in a way that in >>English would involve a preposition - changing "give (something)" to >>"give to (someone)", > > > Indonesian can do something like this _in a few cases_, esp. with the verb > "beri" 'give'-- the forms are beri and berikan. Unfortunately, it's never > been clear to me which was which :-((((. One form leads to a S > corresponding to Engl. "I gave a book to John", the other to "I gave John a > book" -- both can be passivized.
Cool! I'm using something like that in my current project, and I was wondering if there were natlang precedents. I've been calling it an applicative/antipassive since it works as an antipassive with monotransitive verbs--it removes the primary object from the core argument structure in both cases, promoting the secondary object to primary as a side effect since they're distinguished only by word order. I'm a little concerned that I may be breaking a universal here, since I read that antipassives were only found in ergative languages.