Saturday, December 10, 2016

Detail #318: Exceptional Voice Marking in Participles

Consider having participles where certain verbs have exceptional patterns, where the 'wrong' voice may be marked on occasion in order to signal something about the verb. We can imagine a few possibilities:
intransitive verbs taking passive participle marking to signal things
transitive verbs marking passive meaning by active morphology
transitive verbs marking active meaning by passive morphology
verbs marking exceptional voice by passive or active morphology
These are some pretty vague notions this far - we've only really established the notion of
throwing → thrown

or
thrown → throwing
This is pretty boring, so we need to add some exceptional things to this. We could do a thing English almost does already:
scratching post
Sure, the verb there might be a gerund or something instead of an active participle, alternatively English conflates voice in some tenses and aspects with participles. Both analyses might work out, who knows?

What if we add some form of intensification or whatnot? Say, intense participles conflate voice, or for some verbs, the intensive participles are all marked as active participles. 

We can of course go on and have this voice conflation apply even with constructions that are used to form a passive, if the language uses some structure similar to that of English for that purpose. There's no need to do so, however.

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