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

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.