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Re: Active languages

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Friday, July 29, 2005, 15:18
Patrick Littell wrote:
> They describe > Choctaw as having neither a passive nor an antipassive, and Lezgian > as having both. (Although Lezgian is sometimes described as ergative, > it's active by their definition of active.) Lezgian does not appear to > have a *morphological* passive or antipassive voice, though; it appears > to simply allow the agent or patient to go unexpressed.
Do they run any of the standard tests for a change in grammatical relations? I ask, because just stating that arguments can go unexpressed is a pretty naive way to talk about voice systems.
> Only three active languages are considered in their somewhat small sample, > but they predict the following: > > No active language has a passive in which the patient takes NOM.
Georgian is counterevidence to this, at least insofar as NOM can have any meany cross-linguistically. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637

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Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>