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Re: Antipassive

From:Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Date:Saturday, January 18, 2003, 10:54
"Karapcik, Mike" wrote:
> The girl who hit her brother was punished. > > "who hit her brother" is an adjectival subordinate clause. In > English, "who" is nominative/subject/agent, and "brother" is > accusative/object/patient. > The closest antipassive construction that English would come to > would be: > > The girl, who hit at her brother, was punished.
Well, an equivalent in English is our use of the passive in a sentence like "The girl who was hit by her brother was punished". It's not a translation equivalent, but it's the same phenomenon. "Girl" must be the nominative argument of both verbs, thus the use of passives. Likewise, in an ergative language, "girl" would have to be the absolutive argument of both verbs. Thus, in "The girl who was hit by her brother was punished" there'd be no special form (girl-abs who-abs brother-erg hit punished), but in "The girl who hit her brother was punished" you'd need antipassive (girl-abs who-abs brother-oblique hit-antipassive punished) Uatakassi actually has *three* ways of making antipassives. There's the prefix su-, there's the use of dative for the patient, and then there's incorporation (only for simple unmodified nouns). Thus a single sentence, like The man threw the ball Would be, in the active voice: Past-throw-it man-erg ball-abs Antipassivizing it, one has three options: AntiPassive-Past-throw-he/she man-abs ball-inst (instrumental is used for the demoted patient) Past-throw-he/she man-abs ball-dat Past-ball-throw-he/she man-abs In the classical language, the first was the most common, but in most of the descendant languages, teh second was adopted, in several, becoming reanalyzed as an active verb, thus making the dative case serve as accusative and the absolutive becoming nominative. -- "There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd, you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." - overheard ICQ: 18656696 AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42

Replies

Rik <rik@...>Translation thingy (was Re: Antipassive)
Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>Translation thingy (was Re: Antipassive)