Re: Antipassive

En réponse à Jake X <starvingpoet@...>:

> > Antipassive: S(u)-
> What is the function of this voice?
>
Mike's explanation is extremely good, but a bit complicated if you don't have a
good understanding of ergative languages (damn, I'd have had difficulties to
understand it if I didn't know what the antipassive was! ;))) ). So I'm only
gonna give a simple explanation. For the full story, refer to Mike's post.

You know what the passive is in English: it's a way to convert transitive verbs
into intransitive verbs, with the patient (object) suddenly becoming subject of
the new intransitive form, and the original agent (subject) not being expressed
at all (or optionally with a prepositional phrase using "by"). The antipassive
is the ergative languages' equivalent: it's a way to convert transitive verbs
into intransitive ones. But in this case, it's the agent which becomes subject
of the new intransitive form (in ergative languages, the subject of an
intransitive verb is treated like the *object* (patient) of a transitive verb,
and the agent is treated separately, so you could argue that the real "subject"
of a transitive verb is actually the patient), while the patient is not
expressed at all, or only obliquely using whatever system the language has (the
equivalent of an English preposition). If you refer to the posts earlier today
about language types, compare accusative languages and ergative languages and
compare the passive of accusative languages and the antipassive of ergative
languages, you'll see that they parallel each other exactly :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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