Re: antipassives in Tokana (long...)

At 12:10 PM 2/5/99 -0800, Matt Pearson wrote:
>Inspired by yesterday's back-and-forth with Nik Taylor about antipassives
>in Watya'i'sa (sp?), I have decided to add an antipassive construction
>to Tokana.  (It makes sense, given that Tokana is supposed to be an
>ergative language.)  In the process, I have dropped some other features
>of the language, and changed my understanding of absolutive arguments
>in Tokana.  So here's the state of the art:
>[...snip...]
>What do people think?
>
>Matt.
Very interesting!  I like it.

As it happens, well before this thread started I was already thinking about
an antipassive construction in my new, still nameless conlang project (the
one about which I posted a rather long discussion of applicatives and
relative clauses a couple of weeks ago).  But I'm not sure that
"antipassive" is the appropriate term for what I have in mind.  This
language isn't ergative.  Does it make sense to talk about an antipassive in
an accusative language?  Basically, I found that I needed a construction
that changes a transitive verb to an intransitive one by deleting the
patient, the way a passive construction does so by deleting the agent, and
"antipassive" was the only term I knew that sounded close.

In this language, the verb has a pronominal prefix that specifies the person
and number of the subject (for an intransitive verb) or both the subject and
the primary object (for a transitive verb).  The prefix for 3rd-singular
subject is zero; so is the prefix for 3rd-singular subject/3rd-singular
object.  Thus, there's no way to distinguish between, for instance, "he/she
saw him/her/it" and "he/she saw" with no object specified, unless the latter
also has a prefix that specifies that there is no object.  Would such a
prefix properly be termed "antipassive", or would some other term be better?

-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

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        - Alexander Jablokov, _Deepdrive_ (Avon Books, 1998, p. 269)