Re: Animacy of nouns

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 02:49:39 -0700, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>Payne chooses to think of this animacy hierarchy as rather
>an agent-worthiness hierarchy.  That is, a first person argument
>is more likely to be an agent that a second person argument.
>Whether this holds is something that needs to be (and probably
>has been and is being) tested.  In either case, there are general
>tendencies cross-linguistically, and rather than trying to reproduce
>the chart in Payne's book in an e-mail, I'll point you to my
>ergativity reference--specifically, the part where I talk about
>animacy:
>
>http://dedalvs.free.fr/notes.html#4p4
>
>Just scroll down a little and you'll see Payne's table (basically.
>I think I cut out some stuff because it wouldn't fit).
Thanks, that was what I have been looking for. Agent-worthiness. I forgot to
say in my first email that I thought about using this to make nouns not
being able to take some specific role, i.e. nouns considered not to be very
animate cannot be agents. Yet if the verb requires this noun to be agent,
you must fix it using something like passive voice. That way, Tarsyanian
requires both, passives and antipassives, I suppose.

Yours,
Carsten