Re: Antipassive

"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.

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