Re: grammatical cases & semantic roles (was: ergative/accusative)

In a message dated 1/29/2007 2:11:07 PM Central Standard Time,
ray@CAROLANDRAY.PLUS.COM writes:


> BTW - Rick Morneau says "All verbs have a patient, whether stated or
> implied." Is that in fact true?
>
He may be talking about all verbs without voice modification, e.g., passive,
middle, inverse, etc.  In cases that have no apparent subject, it's because
the subject has been demoted by one of those voice-changing operations.
The Latejami words for both "to snow" and "to rain" have a middle-voice
suffix "em" that removes the subject.

cinfepema - snow (out). Note that this verb does not have a subject.

bofepema - rain (out), be raining.

stevo