Re: Markedness of passives and antipassives

Eric Christopherson wrote:
> Somewhere, I seem to have picked up the idea that passive voice verbs
> are marked and therefore do not occur as frequently or as "naturally"
> in a given language as active verbs. I would like the community's
> thoughts on how true this is.
In spoken Engl. they're probably less common than actives; in academic
writing, of course, they're rife!!
>
> One thing that makes me question this received wisdom is that I
> remember reading somewhere about a language where passive
> constructions actually do, contrary to expectation, occur in a
> proportion similar to that of actives. Does anyone know what language
> that might be (or of other such languages)?
This might be referring to Austronesian langs. like Tagalog, where a lot of
the focused verb-forms are sometimes called "passives"; and in that sense
they'd be rather common and not at all highly marked, I think. Among others
you can have--
Active+write  SUBJ. writes...
OBJ-focus   OBJ. is written... (true passive in our sense)
INSTR.-focus  X is used to write...
DATIVE-focus   DAT is written for...
LOC-focus   X is where...was written...
All but active and object-focus would most likely be translated with a cleft
sentence in Engl.-- this pen is what I used to write...  It was at this desk
(~in France) that I wrote... etc.

Indonesian/Malay may be a good ex. too-- a "passive" construction is
required in certain cases (rel.clauses where the head is the DO-- e.g.
..buku yang ditulisnya) "book that he wrote"
   book REL  di-tulis-nya PASS-write-3s  VS.

..orang yang menulis buku... 'person who wrote the book'
  person REL meN-tulis ...  meN- 'active'

and common both in speech and writing.  The claim is that, culturally, a
speaker should avoid drawing attention to him/herself; or in the case of 3d
person, IMO it more often has to do with new/old information (as I suspect
it does in the Tag.-type languages too).