Re: Lost in Space....err, Time

Matt Pearson wrote:
> It makes perfect sense to me that the Watya'i'sa sentence would
> demand to be in the antipassive.  After all, the meaning is not
> "I begin to write the day", but something like "I begin to write *of*
> the day".  I think what you've got your hands on here is some
> sort of partitive (or perhaps 'non-affected object') construction:
D'oh!  Of course!  I was thinking of an implied "I begin to write [the
entry] of today", with, when it was active, "it" (referring to the
implied "entry") as the object.  But, yeah, your perspective does make
sense, that's probably why the active form sounded wrong.

> Compare "I shot the moose" with
> "I shot at the moose".  My guess is that in Watya'i'sa, the
> first sentence would appear in active, while the second
> sentence would be in the antipassive.
Hmm ... possibly.  I've been wondering how I would distinguish those.

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