Re: erg/abs; verbs.

At 18:04 14/03/00 -0500, you wrote:
>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.
>
Very true... OK, forget what I said... :(

>> 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.
>
Except for ga _and_ o. At least that's what I learned. But it's true that
_wa_ only follows the other case-markers (especially _ni_, and _de_ as the
first part of polite negations like _dewa arimasen_ - not to be -).

>> 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.
>
True.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

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