Re: erg/abs; verbs.

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> Generally, the antipassive never shows the actual object (unlike the
> passive of nom/acc languages which can show the agent: 'by')
I'm not so sure that's true - a number of languages with antipassives
*can* show the object.  It can be used in co-ordination, e.g., I bought
the stereo and then went broke, bought would have to be antipassive to
allow I to be omitted from the second sentence, just as "the stereo was
bought by me and then went broke" is non-sensical in English.

> Instead of 'trigger', you could call this affix 'topic'. Japanese has it:
> ga is the marker of subject, wa the marker of topic, o the marker of
> object. wa can replace ga or o, but generally the topic is also the
> subject, so it's rare that wa replaces o.
I thought that _wa_ followed the case-marker except for _ga_.  I know
that combinations like _ni wa_ are legal, where _ni_ indicates indirect
object.

> So unless you have a justification, I'm not sure Perfect could be a tense.
It can be classified as a tense in the context of the language, however,
just as it is in Latin.

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