Re: Antipassive

> From: BP Jonsson
> Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2001 2:29 PM
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: Re: Antipassive
>
> Thanks to all of you that answered my inquiry.  Funny thing not any of the
> several books of typology that I have answer this question in a
> straightforward manner!  I got to sort it out, since my new lang Sahlab is
> ergative.
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.

> 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.
This is a pragmatic consideration and not a syntactic one.  The topic of a
sentence is the person or thing about which something is predicated and is
independent of the valence of the predication or the syntactic relations of
its arguments.   Although there may be subtle semantic interactions between
Topic fronting and voice.  amman iar has both an antipassive and a preferred
pragmatic word order (topic focus verb).  The former is used solely to
change the syntactic relation of the A-function argument (i.e. 'subject' of
a transitive predicate) into an S-function argument (i.e. 'subject' of an
intransitive predicate) in order to meet certain ergatively motivated
syntactic constraints on clause combination. The latter to mark Topic/Focus
distinctions.

> 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.

> 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)
John kissed Mary -> John kissed, [Mary] (Antipassive)

Stay curious,
David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
www.graywizard.net

Wisdom begins in wonder.