Re: Active languages

On 7/29/05, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> 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.

The evidence for the existence of a voice , and it's one of the weaknesses 
of this particular study that oblique arguments (which may be left out) and 
unexpressed/absent arguments are treated identically: to wit, as abstract 
case "C4".

> 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.

Well, in the terminology of the paper, they call this case C1, and define it 
for any given language as the case that the agent takes in an sentence 
(usually the unmarked one) in which both agent and patient are of high 
prominence. Since we were talking about active languages, I chose to render 
C1 as NOM and C2 as ABS.

This definition, incidentally, has a bit of trouble with Phillipine-type 
languages, in which it's tricky to say whether there's a "basic" transitive 
sentence. Even Malagasy, which can be treated as a straightforward 
accusative language, might have trouble with this approach. (Does one treat 
genitive as an oblique case, or as the "basic" case of the agent, out of 
which it moves to become topic?)

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Patrick Littell
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