[despammed] Re: Antipassive

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Jake X <starvingpoet@...>:
>
>
>>>Antipassive: S(u)-
>>
>>What is the function of this voice?
>>
>
>
> Mike's explanation is extremely good, but a bit complicated if you don't have a
> good understanding of ergative languages (damn, I'd have had difficulties to
> understand it if I didn't know what the antipassive was! ;))) ). So I'm only
> gonna give a simple explanation. For the full story, refer to Mike's post.
>
> You know what the passive is in English: it's a way to convert transitive verbs
> into intransitive verbs, with the patient (object) suddenly becoming subject of
> the new intransitive form, and the original agent (subject) not being expressed
> at all (or optionally with a prepositional phrase using "by"). The antipassive
> is the ergative languages' equivalent: it's a way to convert transitive verbs
> into intransitive ones. But in this case, it's the agent which becomes subject
> of the new intransitive form (in ergative languages, the subject of an
> intransitive verb is treated like the *object* (patient) of a transitive verb,
> and the agent is treated separately, so you could argue that the real "subject"
> of a transitive verb is actually the patient), while the patient is not
> expressed at all, or only obliquely using whatever system the language has (the
> equivalent of an English preposition). If you refer to the posts earlier today
> about language types, compare accusative languages and ergative languages and
> compare the passive of accusative languages and the antipassive of ergative
> languages, you'll see that they parallel each other exactly :) .
Hmm. So, would a Split-S language have a passive construction for some
transitive verbs and an antipassive for others? Or both? Would Fluid-S
languages have one, both, or neither?