Passives from Experiencer verbs

[Frederico Meinberg]

Passives from Experiencer Verbs

Dear Lingtyp colleagues,

The French reflexive construction "se voir", 'to see
oneself' can be used to promote an object to subject
position in sentences of the form "se voir" + INF:

(1) Les adolescents se voient	donner	  l?occasion
d?améliorer leurs habiletés.
    Teenagers	    REFL SEE.3P	give.INF  the opportunity to
improve their abilities
    'Teenagers are given the opportunity to improve their
abilities'

(2) Mariah Carey se voit     offrir	 une fortune pour
quitter EMI!
    M.	   C.	 REFL SEE.3P offer.INF	 a fortune to leave
EMI!
    "Mariah Carey is offered a fortune to leave EMI!"

Some corpus work I did effectivelly shows that "se voir" is
used for subject demotion in such cases, effectively
functioning as a passive auxiliary for indirect objects.
Direct objects can also be promoted through this way,
though this is considerably less common.

Such passives seem to be very rare from a typological point
of view. An "Experiencer path" for the grammaticalization
of passive morphology is absent from the standard
discussion of the problem in Haspelmath (1990). Heine and
Kuteva (2002:270) only mention a serial verb construction
in Ancient Chinese, which does not involve reflexives.
 Keenan (1985:260) has examples with "touch" and "suffer"
from Thai and Vietnamese, and mentions that "passives of
this sort are widely attested in languages spoken in
Southeast Asia, including Mandarin, although their analysis
as passives is in fact not obvious".

I suppose that the French construction originated from a
resultative construction of the form "se voir"+ PAST
PARTICIPLE, which exists also in other Romance languages,
but still, it would be important to know if verbs of
experience --especially "see", but maybe also "hear" or
"feel" can be at the origin of passive markers.

Does anybody know any passive marker originating from one
of those "Experiencer" verbs and how it may have been
grammaticalized?

Thank you very much,

Frederico Meinberg

References:

Haspelmath, Martin. 1990. "The grammaticization of passive
morphology". Studies in Language 14:1, 25-72.

Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of
grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.

Keenan, Edward. 1985. "Passive in the world's languages."
In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic
description, vol. 1, Cambridge: CUP, 243-281.