Haranaerzel isjkahmasaesj (The Gray Wizard wrote):
>An antipassive voice is not a _requirement_ of ergative languages,
>especially if the language is only morphologically ergative as opposed to
>being syntactically ergative as well.
I think Sahlab is only morphologically ergative, at least for the time
being. This may change as I explore ergativity, however!
>>However I get new confusion from the answers...
>>
>>1) Since I've decided that Sahlab marks topic with word order
>>(the topic is
>>clause-initial) there would not seem to be any need for a special form of
>>the verb to give topical prominence.
[snip]
>>2) All verbs in Sahlab are lexically marked as either transitive or
>>intransitive, with suffixes to convert between the classes.
>
>I submit that these conversion suffixes are indeed voice operations that
>might perform the same function as an antipassive.
Yes they probably are.
>>I'm not keen on scrapping the topic marking by word order, but it seems
>>that I don't really need both strict transitivity tagging *and* an
>>antipassive form of the verb.
>
>No need to scrap topic marking word order, amman iar has both. Since your
>transitivity tags function as valence decreasing operators, it would seem
>to me that you would only need an antipassive voice if you language needs
>to distinguish between the following operations:
>
>John kissed Mary -> Mary was kissed [by John] (Passive)
_Maraendj Djanardj-al iskezd-aesj _
Mary John-ERG kiss-PAST
>John kissed Mary -> John kissed, [Mary] (Antipassive)
_Djanardj-al iskezd-aesj Maraendj _
so it seems these can be distinguished by word order and case marking!
At 06:41 2001-06-28 -0400, The Gray Wizard wrote:
>better yet, read Dixon's book 'Ergativity'.
I will! :-)
/BP 8^)>
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:bpX@netg.se (delete X)
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