Ŋʒädär: Voices

Although one would think the inverse system would, in some sense, make passives superfluous, c.f.:

man bear kill-inv: the bear kills the man, the man was killed by the bear
man kill-dir bear: the man kills the bear, the bear was killed by the man

It turns out this is not the complete story, for a variety of reasons. In Ŋʒädär finite verbs, there are two possible voices: active and passive. Participles are a bit more complex: they have agentive, patientive and transitive.

The active voice is obviously the way the verb usually works. The passive is formed by introducing the morpheme -sta-/-stä- after the direct/inverse marker. Direct and inverse marking still appear, and there are complications about. In Ŋʒädär, the subject of an active verb can be demoted to an oblique with a passive verb, marked by the oblique instrumental case. The 'alignment' of the verb will depend on where the new subject on the hierarchy with regards to dative subjects. Left of dative subjects, you have direct marking, to the right of it, you have inverse marking.

With participles, the agentive voice expresses an agent, the patientive a patient, and the transitive has both an embedded subject or object, and is an attribute of an external subject or object, thus:

The patientive an agentive voices have, however, the same morpheme marking both of them, viz. -ran/-rän, and whether the head is the subject or object of the participle is marked by the inverse/direct morphemes as compared to the rank of dative subjects. One notable dividing line is that between proximative and obviative third person animate, with the obviative ranking lower than the cutoff point.

galʒa-z-ran iqek
help-dir-ptcpl man
helping man
galʒa-jut-ran iqek
help-inv-ptcpl man
helped man

galʒa-z-ran iqe-qi
help-dir-ptcpl man-prox
helped man(obviative)
galʒa-jut-ran iqe-qi a helping man(obviative)
help-inv-ptcpl man-obv

sikiä-z-rän hark - a leading dog
sikiä-jÿt-rän hark - a led dog

sikiä-z-rän hark-oqu - a led dog(obviative)
sikiä-jyt-rän hark-oqu - a leading dog(obviative)

Oftentimes, an obviative noun will be placed before the participle to decrease the risk of mistaken parsing, but the order given in the above examples is not infrequent either.

The transitive participle has a direct object or a subject, which generally is marked with the dative-genitive. 

imb-im galʒa-z-up igek
child-dat help-act-ptcpl man
the man who helped the child, the child-helping man

imb-im galʒa-jut-up igek
child-dat help-inv-ptcpl man
the man who was helped by a child, the child-helped man

The above example also shows that within steps of the hierarchy, there can be sub-hierarchies. These sub-hierarchies, however, are somewhat verb-specific; in other words, generally speaking, two verbs will not have the major categories of the hierarchy cross any lines, (with some very few exceptions), but within the third person, for instance, there may be differences with regards to noun phrases depending on the verb that is used. Galʒa, for instances, assumes that the more experienced, strong, powerful, influential or closer to 'ideal adult male' the subject is, the more likely it is to be the subject.

Another detail is that a participle might move a noun up or down within its rank - i.e. an animate noun that is also the agent of a participle, is more likely to be the default subject than any other animate noun (even over the obviative/proximative divide), whereas the patient of a participle sinks a bit in rank.