Re: Triggeriness ...

Javier BF wrote:
> To be sincere, I don't see why people make such
> a fuss of this. Maybe because, instead of calling
> subjects "subjects", somebody thought in Tagalog
> the label "subject" was better changed to "trigger",
> so as to make it look really exotic or something.
>
I have no argument with much of what you say. Ultimately it _is_ a
terminological tempest-in-a-teapot, but also a search for accurate and
distinctive ways to describe languages.  The Spanish padres who first
formalized Tag. grammar were certainly familiar with active/passive from
their knowledge of Latin; but I suspect they were quite flummoxed by the
idea that you could "passivize" a location or instrument -- you just don't
do that in Latin (or Spanish).  Yes, you can do the same things by
paraphrase, but that's not what Tag. does.

For a long time, _Western_ analysts of Malay held that Malay verbs were
"essentially passive"; the whole argument dies out once we started referring
to "focus" and "topic" instead (Malay's system is not unlike Tagalog's,
though less complete, and of course the morphology is different and in some
cases lacking.)

Since you mention Basque, you're also aware, I'm sure, that Basque has also
been described as "essentially passive"; that's one way-- probably
inaccurate-- of viewing it, but in fact, its system is simply _different_
from normal Latino-European languages. The problem arose because you can't
"passivize" a sentence like "The man bought a horse" > "a horse was bought
by the man"

I imagine Romance speakers find it odd that English can passivize an
indirect object-- 'Mary was given a book by her father'; I don't know, but
doubt that even other Germanic languages can do that.

My putting all terms like "subject", "passive" et al. in quotes was meant to
show that I don't agree with the way these terms are used in many
grammatical descriptions.  They're a convenient shorthand, but often, when
applied to non-western (=non-IE) languages, likely to mislead when they are
not downright inaccurate.