Re: Antipassive

At 17:30 2001-06-26 -0400, you wrote:
>An antipassive construction is valence decreasing operation that gives
>topical prominence to the agent while rendering the patient either
>unexpressed or obliquely referenced. It is often required in order to meet
>pivot constraints on coordination and subordination of clauses in ergative
>languages.
>
>Active                          -- The tiger killed an eagle.
>Antipassive (patient implied)   -- The tiger killed.
>Antipassive (patient expressed) -- The tiger killed, an eagle.
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.

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.

2) All verbs in Sahlab are lexically marked as either transitive or
intransitive, with suffixes to convert between the classes.

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.

Thoughts?

/BP 8^)>
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:bpX@netg.se (delete X)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~__
                A h-ammen ledin i phith!                \ \
     __  ____ ____    _____________ ____ __   __ __     / /
     \ \/___ \\__ \  /___  _____/\ \\__ \\ \  \ \\ \   / /
     / /   / /  /  \    / /Melroch\ \_/ // /  / // /  / /
    / /___/ /_ / /\ \  / /Melarokko\_  // /__/ // /__/ /
   /_________//_/  \_\/ /Eowine __  / / \___/\_\\___/\_\
Gwaedhvenn Angelmiel \ \______/ /a/ /_h-adar Merthol naun
  ~~~~~~~~~Kuinondil~~~\________/~~\__/~~~Noolendur~~~~~~
|| Lenda lenda pellalenda pellatellenda kuivie aiya! ||
"A coincidence, as we say in Middle-Earth" (JRR Tolkien)

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