Re: What's an active language?

Steven Williams writes:
 > I've seen this term bandied about a bit here recently,
 > and I'm wondering - what on Earth is an active
 > language? How does it differ from a passive language -
 > another term I'm not too well-familiar with. Please to
 > enlighten a young ignorant?
 >
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 > Yahoo! - We Remember
 > 9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost
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I'm no expert, and I've been hoping for a better explanation myself.
But it's a slow night on CONLANG, and I think I can at least
demonstrate what kind of category "active" is, the axes along which it
is defined, even if I get the specifics of the definition itself
wrong.  Hopefully someone will connect me.


It's a matter of how core case roles are divided up.  If you're
familiar with the idea of nominative/accuative languages versus
those with an ergative/absolutive system, you can skip the next
paragraphs or so.

The traditional way of looking at this is to say that are three
semantic roles: the subject of an intransitive verb (S), the subject
of a transitive verb (A) and the object of a transitive verb (O).
Very few languages treat all three as equally different.
Nominative/accusative languages, like English or Latin, treat S and A
the same (nominative) and O differently (accusative).
Ergative/absolutive languages (like Basque, or Dyirbal) treat S and O
the same (absolutive) and A differently (ergative).

(This grouping is most obvious in languages which directly mark case
on the nouns, but it manifests itself in more subtle ways as well.
For instance, in the English sentence "I saw you, and came here", the
subject "came" would be the same as that of "saw", but in the equivalent
construction in Dyirbal, the subject of "came" would be the object of
"saw".)

It should be noted that there are very few purely ergative languages -
most of them go over to a nominative/accusative paradigm under certain
circumstances, which I won't go into here.

Anyway, a third option is that of the so-called "split-S" languages,
in which S is sometimes marked like A and sometimes like O.  "Active"
languages are, I think, a subcategory of these, with the split in S
depending on whether the S is considered to be an agent, or actor, as
opposed to a patient.  The following section from the cases article in
the FAQ demonstrates.

|  3. Active System This system is essentially organised with the agent
|     of action versus the patient, regardless of the transitivity of
|     the verb. That is, the agent of an intransitive verb is treated
|     like the agent of a transative verb, and the patient of an
|     intransative verb is treated like the patient in a transative
|     verb. Let's see some examples to help sort it out:
|
|
|        The window broke (intransative)
|            ACC
|
|        The child cried (intransative)
|            NOM
|
|        The child broke the window (transative)
|             NOM            ACC
 http://enamyn.free.fr/conlang/cases.html#07

Hopefully this at least conveys what kind of thing "active" refers to.

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