[Lingtyp] Double-marked passive

Tue Mar 23 18:56:17 UTC 2021

Dear all,

   I'm afraid I will extend this discussion a bit longer...The fundamental issue is that in defining comparative concepts, one has to draw sharp boundaries on gradual diachronic processes that lead to synchronic continua of typological diversity. And then one has to choose terms for comparative concepts that in many cases were devised for non-typological theories based on a small, genetically and geographically narrow set of languages (Western European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, to name some prominent grammatical traditions). There is no ideal solution, even among those who fully agree with the above statements.

   To elaborate a little bit: Martin's intuition about "passive", and the intuitions of many about defining a "construction", is that there should be dedicated morphosyntax for the function of the "construction". There was already an objection to this intuition in this thread, saying that multifunctional "passive" morphemes should not be excluded. More generally, a dedicated construction is a late stage in the constructionalization process. The first step is recruiting another construction, that is, recruiting a morphosyntactic form used for some related function. Then the recruited construction is gradually adapted to its new function, diverging from the form used for the original function.

   Recruitment is the basic strategy that starts the process towards a "dedicated" construction for a particular function. It's a gradual process. Any choice to delimit a comparative concept beyond the initial recruitment is arbitrary. The definition of a "passive" construction (in my terms) in terms of any form used to express the function is actually the least arbitrary choice -- except that functions (conceptual space) also form a continuum, so dividing that continuum is also arbitrary. But it's necessary for practical reasons, so we can talk about the phenomena we're studying. This is what language is about.

   And language is also about using shared terms in a community. A typological theory of, say, grammatical voice could invent entirely new terms because the "legacy terms" are not typological. But it's not like non-typological theories have a single agreed-upon definition of "passive", or "subject", or pretty much any other important theoretical concept. So recruiting the terms for a typological theory and defining them differently is not abnormal, though if it's too different then a new term may be better. (We may disagree in particular cases.) And in some cases there is continuity between the functional analysis proposed by non-typologists and the functional comparative concept that is useful for typology.

   I think there's another reason that typologists broadened traditional terms to the construction, rather than just the strategy for the construction typical of Western European languages. The point was to find (implicational etc.) universals that hold across all languages. So excluding many languages that don't use a particular strategy from the category in question is not helpful for that purpose.

   I don't expect we'll all agree on the choice of terms. For "relative clause construction", I have restricted the definition to modification by action concepts; so modification by property concepts is excluded. There are also theoretical considerations. For instance, I believe that grammatical voice is about the interplay between the relative salience/topicality of participants and their semantic (force-dynamic) interactions in an event. From that point of view, constructions in the functional domain of voice should be defined in terms of relative topicality of participants and by their force-dynamic interactions in the event.

   I just added the (draft) Glossary to the (draft) chapters of "Morphosyntax" that I have posted on my webpage (http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACpubs.html), to give an idea of how I have constructed comparative concepts for many constructions.

Bill

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Bohnemeyer, Juergen <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2021 8:30 AM
To: Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>
Cc: LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Double-marked passive

  [EXTERNAL]

Martin, I don’t want to extend this discussion beyond its best-by date, but the example you cite...

> So the reason I would opt for the form-based definition of "passive" (as opposed to the function-based definitions favoured by Bohnemeyer and Givón-Croft) is that the term "passive" is generally used for a strategy, in actual usage. It would be very odd to say that a sentence with a fronted object and focused subject like German "Den Mann hat der LÖWE gesehen" (= 'The man was seen by the LION') is a passive construction.

… would not meet the definition of ‘demotion’ I was assuming in my definition of ‘passive':

> A passive is a construction that combines with a causative description and whose semantic impact is the demotion of the causer while retaining the causative meaning.

I would define ‘demotion’ such that the definition presupposes a default assignment of the highest-ranked semantic role to the subject or pivot (the highest-ranked syntactic argument position). Demotion is then an operation that blocks this default assignment. In your example, the highest-ranked role is the experiencer, and it is assigned to the syntactic subject, so there’s no passive construction involved by my definition.

Via this definition of ‘demotion’, which involves a mix of semantic and syntactic properties (it is a form-meaning mapping property), the definition of ‘passive’ acquires enough syntactic anchoring to clearly target ‘strategies’, as opposed to mere meanings, while still avoiding the apparent pitfalls of including a purely formal property such as verb-coding in the definition.

Best — Juergen

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Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
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University at Buffalo

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