Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Detail #338: A Voice - Dereflexive

Consider a language where the only pronominal way of distinguishing third persons is the distinction between reflexive and regular third persons.

In cases where only one third person is prominent, this is not widely used but sometimes the distinction is used outside its origin in reflexivity.

Here, we can consider a situation where a  basic voice marker and the reflexive marker - be they of whatever kind you want - combine forces to form a "dereflexive" - a voice that lacks a proper subject, but instead has a reflexive marking that is the real subject of the thing.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Could you maybe add an example?

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    1. After an almost embarassingly long time, here's an elucidation! https://miniatureconlangs.blogspot.com/2018/05/explaining-dereflexive.html

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