Re: Antipassives

At 15:21 17/07/03, Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>En réponse à Ian Spackman :
>
>>I'm sure I once read (whether it's true or false) that passives approach
>>universality (presumably in nominative languages).  Is this true?
>>   Does the
>>same hold for antipassives in ergative languages?
>
>No, AFAIK. I'm pretty sure Euskara has no antipassive voice, and I don't
>think it's that common in ergative languages.
OK.  My intuition (from my limited translation into Holic) was that an
antipassive isn't as important as a passive; maybe I was right.

>>Or, I suppose: is there a reason that (anti)passives are especially useful
>>that hasn't occurred to me?
>
>The same reasons passives are useful: leave something unspecified, put
>something in topic, make syntactic agreement possible (the nice syntactic
>ergativity our Gray Wizard likes so much ;)))) ), etc...
Right.  Leaving something unspecified I was thinking might be handled with
dummy pronouns (already used once in another context) or other more or less
empty words.

I've already come to the conclusion I need a topicalising particle because
word order's not free enough.  Or - hm - I could use intonation, which I've
not really used in this language.  (Is intonation for topic likely?  Does
it occur in any natlangs?  I'm not using it for focus - that's done by word
order and/or a particle.)

Which leaves the syntactic agreement thing (I'm assuming that this is the
matter of what the understood subject is in a coordinated clause).  Hm, if
perhaps this can be handled with a rule that it is assumed to be the topic
(which will have been marked in the prior clause).  Does that work?

Ian