[Lingtyp] passive and tense

Sat Nov 9 12:13:05 UTC 2019

Peter,

I am aware that this idea is still wide-spread, but the putative
diachronic link between ergatives and passives, which primarily stems
from terminological imprecisions in early descriptions of the history of
ergativity in Indo-Iranian, has actually long been discarded for that
branch of languages. The patient orientation of the participle in
question when involving a transitive verb root does not make the orignal
resultative construction a passive. To name only some of the arguments
(and see the references and quite a few other studies below for
details): It is just as productively formed from intransitives, where it
has active interpretations. With transitives, it is not derived from an
active counterpart.

Uta

Haig, Geoffrey. 2008. Alignment change in Iranian languages. A
Construction Grammar approach. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Hock, Hans Heinrich. 1986. P-oriented construction in Sanskrit. In
Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Colin P. Masica & Anjani Kumar Sinha (eds.),
Structure, convergence, diglossia in South Asian languages, 15–26.
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Klaiman, Miriam H. 1978. Arguments against a passive origin of the IA
ergative, Chicago Linguistic Society: Papers from the 14th Regional
Meeting. 204–216.

Reinöhl, Uta. 2018. Review of Eystein Dahl & Krzysztof Stroński (eds.).
2016. Indo-Aryan ergativity in typological and diachronic perspective.
Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 5(1). 111-121.

And a paper which is not out yet:

Casaretto, Antje, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, Birgit Hellwig, Uta Reinöhl &
Gertrud Schneider-Blum. Accepted. Roots of ergativity in Africa (and
beyond). To appear in /Studies in African Linguistics/.

Am 08/11/2019 um 18:53 schrieb Peter Austin:
> There is also a correlation noted at various places in the literature
> between past/perfective and ergative constructions (in languages with
> tense-aspect conditioned split ergativity) and the diachronic link
> between ergatives and passives.
>
> Peter
>
>
> On Fri, 8 Nov 2019 at 18:33, Haspelmath, Martin <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
> <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
>
>     Yes, I found this discussed by Comrie in 1981, and discussed it
>     myself in 1994:
>
>     Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Aspect and voice: Some reflections on
>     perfect and passive. In Philip J. Tedeschi & Annie Zaenen (eds.),
>     /Tense and aspect/ (Syntax and Semantics 14), 65–78. New York:
>     Academic Press.
>     Haspelmath, Martin. 1994. Passive participles across languages. In
>     Barbara Fox & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), /Voice: Form and function/
>     (Typological Studies in Language), 151–177. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
>     doi:10.1075/tsl.27.08has
>     <http://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.27.08has,%0D%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20https://zenodo.org/record/227097>.
>     (https://zenodo.org/record/227097
>     <http://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.27.08has,%0D%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20https://zenodo.org/record/227097>)
>
>     But there must be more recent work about this as well.
>
>     Best,
>     Martin
>
>     On 08.11.19 18:19, Sergey Lyosov wrote:
>>     Dear colleagues
>>
>>     Working with corpora of certain Semitic languages, I noticed that
>>     passive verb forms are much more frequent in the past tenses than
>>     in present and future tenses. This is also my impression of
>>     various languages with which I am familiar but have not studied
>>     their verbal systems. Does such cross-linguistic feature exist?
>>     If yes, how do we explain it?
>>
>>     Best wishes,
>>
>>     Sergey
>>
>
>
>     --
>     Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de  <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
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> --
> Prof Peter K. Austin
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