Re: THEORY: Meanings of Verbal Accidents.

--- MorphemeAddict@WMCONNECT.COM wrote:

> In a message dated 8/10/2007 3:21:57 PM Central
> Daylight Time,
> eldin_raigmore@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
>
> > For instance, in English, the "-ing" suffix on
> most finite verbs means
> > progressive aspect or continuing aspect or
> habitual aspect; and the "-ed"
> > suffix on most finite verbs means past tense or
> perfective or completive
> > aspect.
> >
> > But on most participles, "-ing" means active voice
> and "-ed" means passive
> > voice.
> >
> > Example: if the Volkswagen passes the Ferrari, the
> VW is "the passing car"
> > and
> > the Ferrari is "the passed car".
> >
> > But sometimes even on participles "-ing" means
> imperfective or present and "-
> > ed" (or "-n" if that's an allomorph) means
> perfective or past.
> >
> > For example if I have two children, a 10-y/o and a
> 20-y/o, one might be
> > my "growing" child and the other my "grown" child.
> >
>
> I think you're confusing two uses of the past
> participle (in -ed/-en).  One
> use is the active past participle as in "has grown",
> which produces "my grown
> child".  This is not passive at all.
> The other use *is* the passive, where it is used
> with "be", and this produces
> "was passed" and "the passed car".

I don't think that the original poster had any
confusion. The question was about the very fact that
one morpheme has two different uses.

In any event, I think this is fairly common.  In Latin
for instance, the same set of morphemes can be either
active or passive, depending on the verb they are
attached to. This set of morphemes is usually called
'passive' or 'deponent', but the deponent is really
just an active use:

  deponent                   passive
 mori-or 'I die'       ~   am-or  'I am loved'

 Ancient Greek has the same thing, but it is less
systematic about it.  I think it's also present in
some Scandinavian languages, where -s can mean either
a passive of sorts or active/reflexive, but please
correct me if I am wrong about that.

  In my conlang, Silindion, the passive principle part
can also be used to form perfectives in some
intranstive verbs.

  passive
perfective
nal-di-a-nto  'they are lit'             fil-di-a-nto
 'they have come'
root-pass.-pres.-3p
root-pass.-pres.-3p

 -Elliott



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