Volitional patients

[Daniel]

What has been said on causative marking in connection with 
volitionality/agentivity of the Causee seems to be extremely widespread. 
If this is of relevance, I might also refer to the article currently in 
preparation by Timur Maisak, Solmaz Merdanova and myself on causatives 
in Agul (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian), where the locative Causee seems to 
be less agentive / volitional than nominative Causee (which in a way 
appears to work in the opposite direction to the cases mentioned already).

However, to my eyes, this phenomenon seems to be only indirectly related 
to the query Ashild made - about Patients with _non-causative_ verbs 
marked differently depending on their volitionality. More relevant is 
the side of discussion which concerns dative/accusative ~ benefactive - 
volitionality connection. In this respect it is more interesting to find 
non-causative verbs that work this way. And the cases when different 
semantic classes of the verbs choose different patient marking patterns 
(accusative vs. dative), like those that Paul Hopper mentions, appear to 
me to be of much greater relevance (even if the same verb can not change 
Patient marking depending on the volitionality of the Patient and the 
phenomenon is thus lexicalized).



As to the masochistic side of the problem, I'd like to indicate that 
dative sometimes express not only bene-factives, but also male-factives, 
which seems to solve part of the problems Ashild mentions.

Michael Daniel