Re: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project

In a message dated 8/5/2007 5:52:38 AM Central Daylight Time,
nick.scholten@GMAIL.COM writes:


> David J. Peterson wrote:
> <<<<<
> What, for example, is the semantic difference between "The man
> pushed the panda" and "The panda was pushed by the man"?
> >>>>>
>
> Between those exact sentences there is no difference in meaning, only in
> point of view. I think the biggest difference between the two is that in 1
> you can leave out the accusative and in the second the oblique (or well,
>
There is a difference between an active sentence and its passive version.
Namely, the topicality, or relative importance, of the sentence arguments is
different.  Using the passive decreases the topicality of the active subject,
while simultaneously increasing the topicality of the passive subject (active
object).
The two sentence mean basically the same thing, but the nuances are different.

stevo   </HTML>