Re: Existential voice

Ray Brown wrote:

>> It's probably better to define it as a valence decreasing operation. I
>> don't know if any language that does this ... Thomas E. Payne gives
>> examples of "impersonal passives" which can make the subject of an
>> intransitive verb unspecified, but this wouldn't work with transitive
>> verbs like your two examples.
>
>
> But it does! In what way do _metitur_ and _speratur_ not mean the same as
> Gregory's "yövïnawne" and "hütawne" respectively?
>
> These make both the subject and the object of transitive verbs unspecified.
That's good to hear! Since I don't know much about Latin, I didn't
suspect that anything like that existed. The examples in _Describing
Morphosyntax_ are things like "Es wird hir getanzt", with intransitive
verbs.