Monday, August 31, 2015

Detail #200: Conflated Participles and Culture

Imagine a language where you have your usual passive and active participles. However, for some verbs, these are morphologically conflated (due to sound change, semantic shift or whatever). Some of these conflations are given cultural significance, i.e. judges are called 'decided/deciding', and this is parsed as them having been decided for their role, as well as their role being that of deciding what is right. 

Some other participles might exist, and if the change that has led to conflation is not sound change-related but rather some odd semantic-grammatic change, you might have other conflations as well, and maybe those too are parsed as telling something significant about the action itself as well as those who the participle pertain to, e.g. maybe the active participle and the recipient participle of 'hunt' is the same, and therefore, hunting is understood as something that is done by the hunter for himself more than for the others that benefit from the game he catches. 

Maybe an instrumental participle and the passive participle of 'strike with a hammer' are conflated, and the fact that tools can be used to make tools is somehow seen as embedded in this.

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