Re: not un-/anti-passive

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 3:41 PM, Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...>
wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:44:07 +0300, JR <fuscian@...> wrote:
>
/snip/

> >Eldin, in applicatives, an non-direct object, or oblique argument is
> >promoted to direct object, as I understand. I don't see that ocurring here
> >though. Not really sure about good web resources for the circumstantial -
> >there's a little here, a little there. There's a page on wikipedia, but I
> >think there's a mistake in it.
>
> WRT mistake, what do you have in mind?
>
This sentence: "One very common circumstantial voice is the ordinary passive
voice <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice>, which promotes a
patient<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_%28grammar%29>to the
subject position." First, I think the author must have meant direct
(or indirect) object instead of patient, but anyway, why would this be
considered a type of circumstantial voice? CV is defined a couple of lines
earlier as promotion of an oblique argument, and how is a DO oblique?

I'll refrain for now from responding to the other points raised, because I'm
drowning in a mud of inconsistent and ill-defined terminology....

But I'll mention one other thing that I saw in Frank Palmer's _Grammatical
Roles and Relations_, which you may or may not be familiar with. In Japanese
there's an 'adversity passive', morphologically identical to the regular
passive, but in which someone negatively affected is put into subject
position:

Mary ga    piano o      hi-ita
Mary Nom piano Acc play-Pst
'Mary played the piano'

John ga    Mary ni  piano o     hik-are-ta
John Nom Mary by piano Acc play-Pass-Pst
*'John was adversely played the piano by Mary'

Other examples could be translated as 'John's wife died on him', 'I was
subjected to a burglar stealing a bicycle from me', and 'John was rained on'
(in this last one 'John' is given the topic marker 'wa' instead of the
nominative 'ga', not sure how relevant this is).

This seems relevant to what is happening in Naisek, and worth looking into.
There's a short paper on the phenomenon at
http://www2005.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~fajl4/Ishizuka.pdf where the author
discusses whether this construction raises the valence or not, and I'm sure
there's much more to be read too.

Josh