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Re: Active languages

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Saturday, July 30, 2005, 15:36
Hallo!

Thomas Wier wrote:

> 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.
It is. In Old Albic (my conlang), each (or both) of the arguments of a transitive clause can go unexpressed, with the verb not carrying the agreement markers: (1) Lennára hena lennas. sing-PRES-3SG:P-3SG:A child-AGT song-OBJ `A child sings a song.' (2) Lennara hena. sing-PRES-3SG:A child-AGT `A child sings.' (3) Lenná lennas. sing-PRES-3SG:P song-OBJ `A song is sung.' (4) Lenna. sing-PRES `There is singing.' Yet, I call these "zero-agent" and "zero-patient" constructions and avoid the terms "passive" and "antipassive" because I don't think these can be properly called "verb voices", lacking any kind of morphological marking on the verb (other than the absence of agreement markers) or changes to the cases of the nouns. Greetings, Jörg.

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>