Re: Help on Verbs...

"Dr. David E. Bell" wrote:

> Interestingly, Rick Morneau in his wonderful paper on Lexical Semantics
> interprets voice as essentially a valency modifying operator, an
> interpretation that I find powerfully analytical.  For Rick, both passive
> and middle voice involve a demotion of the A-function argument of the
> underlying active predicate.  The distinction between the two is that this
> demoted argument is optionally expressable in passive constructions but not
> expressable at all in middle constructions.  (Is Rick on this list?  If so,
> did I get that right?)  Of course this refers to what is sometimes called
> the mediopassive and not the reflexive-like middle exemplified above.
I re-read LS each season, as it slowly evolves.
He never has posted on CONLANG since 1996, when I arrived.
I wrote a special HTMLizer script just for LS ...

I see his voice as a combination valency and topicalization
operator that is super-productive in derivation of nouns,
and 10 or so other major classes of words.

It is easy enough to topicalize simply by word order
or a particle, but to be able to derive "teach/study/subject"
from the same root requires a deeper understanding of valency,
and then to further distinguish learn/study/review ...
is impossible without a powerful derivational system.

His other essays are also amazing.