Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Bryatesle: The Passive and Related Concerns

Bryatesle has a single morpheme for changing transitivity as well as valency of a verb; this thus serves multiple roles - passives, applicatives, adjutatives, circumstantials, reflexives, otherwise detransitives, and so on.

The morphological processes involved consist of finding the passive root. In the atelic, this most often is the third person plural, with the last consonant lopped off. In the telic, it's the second person plural, with the last consonant, or the last syllable's nucleus and coda lopped off. To this is added -l(i)v-, after which -an, -an, -a, -am, -e, -as, -a is suffixed depending on person of the subject.

Distinguishing the different potential meanings is achieved by use of the rich case system of Bryatesle. For the causative, the introduction of a causee as an accusative or dative object marked in addition by the secondary subject case, gives a causative. The object of the causative verb remains in whichever case it is expected to go in.

Some form of detransitivization is the usual parsing of a transitive verb with the voice marker on it. With the reciprocal object case on the nominative subject, you obtain a reflexive verb. With no marker or the partitive on top of the nominative, it's a regular passive.

Another way of forming reflexivity for third persons is obtained by having a noun or a third person pronoun as subject and a third person pronoun (of the same number and gender) as some other argument (in whichever case is relevant) and the voice marker on the verb. For first and second person, reusing first and second persons in the relevant positions is the usual way of forming reflexives - either of the two ways mentioned here are permissible, and in that case, this emphasizes the reflexivity.

Dropping objects is also possible with the voice marker; this requires having a pronoun of the same number and person as the subject, with the secondary subject marker on it as an argument of the retransitivized verb.

Applicatives and circumstantials are marked the same, but in those, this only promotes a phrase to object (or subject) status without changing its marking. The normal subject (or object) is however demoted. In the case of circumstantial constructions, the normal subject is demoted to being marked with dative with secondary subject status (or omitted), while the phrase that is turned into new subject simply is moved to clause-initial position. In the case of applicatives, the 'normal' object is either omitted or in the ablative partitive.

Finally, impersonal verbs such as 'rain' or 'night falls' or the like, often take the voice morpheme no matter their transitivity.

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