Re: Core Cases (was Re: Ditransitivity (again!))

Quoting "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>:

> > The sister lang Steienzh holds on to it's nominatives more forcibly, and
> > would say:
> >
> > Ta teshsh         I see
> > Ta teshsh sens    I see her(/him/it)
> > Teshshez sen      She(/he/it) is seen
> >
> > (_Sen teshshez_ would be more neutral syntax in the last example.*)
>
> So _Teshshez_ is a passive verb?
Indeed. More exactly, the ending -ez removes the nominative argument, promotes
the accusative one to nominative, and leaves any datives intact (no English-
style "John was given the book" passives).

The old nominative may be reintroduced as an instrumental, which means you can
have a distinction between _ta teshsh sens_ "I saw her" and _sen teshshez
ti_ "she was seen by me". This is not possible to do morphologically in
Tairezazh; topicality etc has to be indicated solely by WO and stress.

> > Nonetheless, it does sport the traditional Klaishic "zerovalent" verbs
> like
> > _kreshsh_ "(it) rains".
> [snip]
>
> Now that's a nice concept, zerovalent verbs. Ebisedian doesn't really have
> such a notion, although it's possible to state a verb without any nouns.
> It would then be possible to use, eg., the receptive slot to indicate the
> land it is raining on, etc..
Any finite Tairezazh verb is in principle a grammatical sentence on its own;
you're allowed to leave out all arguments if they can be infered from context
or are irrelevant. Steienzh, more conservatively, require an expressed subject
except with zerovalents and imperatives.

                                                        Andreas