Re: Evolution of Applicatives

Thomas R. Wier scripsit:

> Just look at English, for example.  Mark Baker has argued (IMO
> plausibly) that English has a kind of "abstract incorporation"
> with verbs which take prepositional complements become phonologically
> fused to them, and then this process feeds passivization, which
> cannot normally occur with prepositional complements:
>
> (1) a.  John has slept in the bed.
>     b.  The bed has been slept in.
> (2) a.  David was writing on Tuesday, but not Thursday.
>     b.  **Tuesday was being written on.
But 2b is perfectly perspicuous if Tuesday is the topic rather than the
date, and if it were (somewhat improbably) the name of a blackboard,
then 2b would be excellent.  Yet even if you want to say that "writing
on" is fused in the latter case, it seems exceedingly unlikely to me
that it is fused in the former case.

> (1b) is fine for most, if not all, speakers, but (2b) is
> ludicrously ungrammatical.
Ah yes, like "Spiro conjectures Ex-Lax."  :-)  See below.

> My understanding is (to be brief) that some
> languages are like English (the goal can passivize, the patient
> can't), some are like some Bantu languages (the patient can
> passivize, the goal can't), and others are like IIRC Norwegian
> and some English dialects (where both arguments can passivize).
Can you be a little less brief here, and illustrate what works
and what doesn't, at least for English?

--
A: "Spiro conjectures Ex-Lax."                  John Cowan
Q: "What does Pat Nixon frost her cakes with?"  jcowan@reutershealth.com
  --"Jeopardy" for generative semanticists      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan