Re: What would you call this?

Andreas Johansson wrote at 2003-06-17 22:11:25 (+0200)
 > 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?
 >
Shouldn't these be the other way around?  I mean, I'm probably not
best placed to say, but they look like an antipassive (demoting
patient) and passive (demotng agent) respectively.

I don't know that it's meaningful to say that they don't change a
valency - reimazo takes two core arguments and reimolazo only one,
yes?  What does "valency" mean beyond that?

Is it possible to supply the dropped noun as an oblique argument?

Are there any syntactic structures in the language which show either a
nom/acc or erg/abs distinction, but will work on the other argument of
a transitive through use of the passive or antipassive respectively?
Examples might be reflexivization, relativization or conjunction
reduction (quoting from the table in _Describing Morphosyntax_.

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