Re: Antipassives
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, July 17, 2003, 14:21 |
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En réponse à Ian Spackman :
>How common are antipassives?
>
>I'm sure I once read (whether it's true or false) that passives approach
>universality (presumably in nominative languages). Is this true?
If you mean that nominative languages always have a passive voice, it may
be a an exaggerated claim, but it's true that I don't know of any
nominative language without a passive voice (even Japanese as one). But I'm
pretty sure you can find examples (Mandarin maybe?).
> 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.
>The reason I ask is that I don't have an antipassive in Holic, and nor do I
>see a likely way to construct one. Any former antipassive would have been
>lost in the Old Holic period, and I can't see how a replacement would have
>arisen. So the question is, is this a problem?
Not in my opinion. If Basque speakers can live without an antipassive, so
should Holic speakers be able to ;))) .
>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...
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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