[Lingtyp] agent-like entities in anticausative constructions

[Sergey Loesov]

Dear colleagues,



In my field material on Modern Western Aramaic, a moribund language still
spoken in the Syrian Antilebanon mountains, I often come across clauses
like this one:



Mácana ḥarb̥aṯ ʕimm.

The machine broke down on me



The verb ḥarb̥aṯ is anti-causative, the ʕimm prepositional phrase ‘on me’
(lit. ‘with me’) refers to the participant via whose involuntary
involvement the action took place.



 Another similar example:



‘Hanna finžōna ičber!?!’ ‘Iskaṭ ʕimm ana ŭ ʕa-nmažǝlya’.

‘This glass is broken!?’ ‘It fell on me while I was washing it’.



The preposition ʕimm, here ‘on me’, does not imply that the glass fell onto
the speaker but rather that it fell through some fault of its own.



Nonetheless, with real passives this ʕimm is purely associative and cannot
be used to introduce the agent, as illustrated by the sentence



inəkṭal Žaržūra ʕimməl‿Ḥasan,

 which can only be interpreted as

‘Žaržūra was killed (together) with Ḥasan’ rather than

‘Žaržūra was killed by Ḥasan’.



How do we describe this participant in an anti-causative verb phrase?



Thank you very much!



Sergey
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