Re: Help in Determining Asha'ille Typology

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> What would we call a language that marks "I" from (1) the same as "I" in (3),
> and "I" in (2) the same as "food" in (1)? Beyond weird, that is.
So you would have the following marking (using AGT and PAT
for convenience):

1. I:AGT eat food:PAT
2. I:PAT run
3. I:AGT fall

That's not too hard to imagine. First of all, several active languages
mark all events with AGT, which explains 3). Now, why 'I' in the
second example is marked as a PAT isn't too hard to explain. Probably
some lexicalization going on. There are plenty of examples in e.g.
Chickasaw of this. Perhaps the the verb "run" has got a reflexive
marker, which for syntactic reasons makes the argument mandatorily
marked as PAT? There is anadew evidence for this. :-)

Of course, this is just an exception. Most of the time, verbs
like the one in example 2) behave as they should. But as Tom Wier
points out in another mail, an active language is an active
language regardless of how S is marked, as long as it alters
between AGT and PAT. In this case the marking doesn't make
much sense semantically, though.

Daniel Andreasson