Re: Active languages

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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