Re: Trigger Systems (was Re: Book on constructive linguistics)

>
> As you may recall from past discussions, this is pretty much my view. Or
> call them "focus systems" -- after all, the English (or other) passive is
> simply a way of shifting focus from Agent/etc. to Patient, and Philippine
> langs. merely go several steps further, being able to "passivize" many of
> the constituents in a sentence (as you do in your English examples)--
>
There are interesting discussions of this in:

1) Grammatical Voice by Klaiman

2) Subject and Topic edited by Li and Thompson

 In (1) Klaiman argues that there is a difference between voice whose
primary function (or one of whose primary functions) is argument
rearrangement (derived voice) and voice whose primary function is
marking of pragmatic roles (pragmatic voice). There are languages which
have voice operations marked on the verb that mark pragmatics but do not
really alter the argument structure of the verb, although I think
finding a language with derived voice that doesn't ALSO have a pragmatic
function may be more difficult. In any case, Klaiman argues that the
Tagalog trigger system is a pragmatic voice system, and thus implicitly
argues that it marks pragmatic notions but is NOT primarily argument
rearranging.
 This is supported by a paper in (2) which examines the function of the
trigger in Tagalog, and whether the trigger is the subject of the
clause. The paper concluded that there are some typical subject
properties associated with triggers and some typical subject properties
always associated with the normal (A/S) subject. Thus by the normal
defining criteria of subject either:

(i) Tagalog has no true subject role (the subject criteria converging on
one NP ONLY when the trigger is also the A/S argument)

or

(ii) Tagalog has two semi-subject roles that share typical subject
properties between them

I'm afraid that I don't own (2), so I can't offhand recall all the
details, but you should be able to order it from your library if you're
interested.

> I often suspect it's simply a terminological dispute-- Passives, Focus,
> Trigger-- sama-sama. Use of the "trigger" term in AN/Philippine linguistics
> is of rather recent origin, I think, and not widely used.
>
I think the reason for adopting such an approach is because the term
"voice" is still biased towards the voice typically found in European
languages, that is derived voice.

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