Re: THEORY: Verb voice

At 12:35 pm -0700 3/5/99, JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:
>On Mon, 3 May 1999, R. Nierse wrote:
>
>> I don''t know for sure if the example I've encountered really is a voice.=
 I
>> haven't found it in other natlangs or conlangs, it is called 'Non-control=
'
>> and I found in Sechelt (Salishan):
>> k0u-St-la-waL-L@m-n@x-am  'now we have forgotten it (and there was nothin=
g
>> we could do about it)'.
>> IRR-1PL-now-forget-NON_CNTRL-1PL
>>
>> The -n@x- indicates that the actor has no control over the action. I was
>> very much intrigued by this suffix at the time I studied the language. Ar=
e
>> there any others that have examples of 'non-control'?
>
>I wouldn't call this a "voice" in the traditional sense - viz. morphology
>on the verb which indicates a manipulation of the mapping between
>argument structure or semantic roles (agent, patient) and surface
>grammatical relations (subject, object; nominative, absolutive; etc.).
That's a pretty neat & useful definition of "voice" :)

>But it's certainly an interesting phenomenon.
I agree and certainly both in your definition and in other 'traditional'
definitions of voice, this is not a distinction of voice.

I wonder at first if this were an aspectual difference; but this deals with
ideas like completed or incompleted, habitual, iterative or frequentative,
inchoative or inceptive actions/states etc.  Non-control is different
since, I guess, any of these aspects may be encountered whether the subject
has control over the action or not.

Et dans un courrier dat=E9 3/5/99 Mathias a =E9crit ::
>Dans un courrier dat=E9 du 03/05/99 08:21:37  , vous avez =E9crit :
[....]
>There are lots of items that may be stuck (in)to voices like control,
>volition, etc., regarless it's already implied in the meaning of the verb.
Ah, now 'volition' immediately suggests _modality_ to me, i.e. a different
"mood".  Modal distinctions, whether made inflexionally or, as in English,
with modal auxiliaries, cover a wide range of meanings, especially
attitudes on the part of the speaker/writer towards the factual content of
what is uttered or written, e.g. uncertainty, factuality, possibility,
necessity etc.  It would seem to me that is 'non-control' a modal attribute
of the verb.

Ray.