Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: What would you call this?

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 17, 2003, 20:11
Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

> Well, only if it changes the relations of the verb. Can you elide > arguments of the verb without so changing the grammatical relations? > If so, then this is no passive.
This reminds me of a somewhat confused (on my part at least!) discussion of antipassives we had some time back. Anyway, since then Altaii has acquired two verb forms I label "passive" and "antipassive". The thing has rigid SOV syntax, so we get sentences like this: Yza eze reimazo yza eze reim -azo 3f 3m see PAST "She saw him" As seen, only WO tells us that _yza_ is subject and _eze_ object - _eze yza reimazo_ means "he saw her". Now, we can drop either argument, provided we supply the appropriate suffix on the verb: Yza reimolazo yza reim -ol -azo 3f see PASSIVE PAST "She saw" Eze reimeizazo eze reim -eiz -azo 3m contact ANTIPASSIVE PAST "He was seen" Now, my "gut feeling" is that neither of these suffixes is changing any valences - they're only telling which argument has got dropped, the other being found in its normal place. If so, I guess they shouldn't properly be called "passive" and "antipassive", altho' I'm at a loss as what else to call them. How would you analyze these? Andreas PS Altaii word of the day; Maralandzhinistaiz "neotraditionalism".

Replies

Tim May <butsuri@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>