Re: Passive sentences and indirect objects

On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 04:00:04 +1030, Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating
Dragon) <dragon@...> wrote:
> I've been thinking about how Gzarondan should handle passive sentences
> in which an indirect object is promoted to subject, as in the English
> example:
>
>    "I was read to by my cousin."
>
> (as opposed to ordinary passive: "The book was read by my cousin.")
This presumes that Gzarondan *can* promote oblique (?) arguments to
the subject, not just the direct object... German, for example,
cannot, and simply fronts the indirect object but keeps it in the
dative: "Mir wurde von meinem Cousin vorgelesen".

The agent becomes oblique, as it's a passive sentence, but there's no
overt nominative-case object. If you include the book, it'd be in the
nominative: "Mir wurde das Buch vorgelesen".

> The main question is what to do with the preposition "to".
Does Gzarondan use a preposition as well? (For example, German uses
dative case-marking rather than a preposition.)

> There's nothing
> particularly weird in principle about a hypothetical language choosing
> "to I was read"
Though that looks as if "I" is the object of the preposition... so
it's not the subject of the sentence, is it, since it's not
"nominative"?

> or "I was to read" or a variety of options.
*nods* For example, a pre-verbal particle or prefix.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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