Re: help: Naming Trentish voice markers

Muke Tever sikyal:

I thought I'd give this a shot, since this system of voice markers is
really fascinating, and noone else appeared to have much to say.

To begin with, I wouldn't call these "voice."  According to the chapter on
verbal operators in _Describing Morphosyntax_ by Payne (easily the most
interesting chapter, for me at least), voice properly refers to an
operation which changes the syntactic position of the argument with a
lower thematic role, generally moving it to the "subject" position.
Your markers, on the other hand, don't seem to change the verb's
valency, but merely change the focus.

(Or maybe not. Now that I look again at your examples, it seems more like
voice than I first thought, although it's pretty different from standard
passivization.)

In any case, here's my suggestions for names.

>           Agentfocus Patientfocus marking
>            high       low             zero
Active, as Eng "Fire burns paper."

>            high       no patient   tli-
Unergative, as Eng "Fire burns." (If I remember my syntax correctly, this
is actually what syntacticians call such sentences in English.)

>            high       agt=pat      Uk-
Middle or Reflexive.  The two are actually different: The sentence you
glossed as "I brush my teeth" using this affix was middle, but "The teeth
brush themselves" would be reflexive. You can conflate them if you want,
though.

>            low        high         ?uu-
Passive, as Eng "Paper is burned by fire."

>            no agent   high            zero
Unaccusative, as Eng "Paper burns." I *know* that this is the proper name
for such sentences in English.

>            agt=pat    high         (unattested.. *Uk- ?)
Middle (again, although it seems to me that if agt=pat, the difference
between agent focus and patient focus is pretty weak.)

Hope that helps.  It's always fun to get to use the word "unergative" in a
sentence ;-).

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton

Reply