Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Detail #273: Passives and Semantic Roles

One thing that could be interesting is to have the passive more sensitive to the semantic role of the object of the verb; thus, objects that are stimuli acquire different passive markers than objects that are patients, etc.

But what if we want to mark a subject's role with similar precision? Simple, use a voice that turns the subject into an object (and drops the regular object, and makes the verb lack subject), then stack the passive on top of it, giving us the following:
verb_stem-antiactive-passive[semantic role]

1 comment:

  1. As a little justification for the somewhat odd stacking of voices, Finnish does sometimes stack morphemes with somewhat opposite voice implications.

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