Sunday, May 26, 2019

Detail #379: Inverse Alignment of an Unusual Type

I think I promised to stop doing alignment things a good while ago, but I am like some kind of addict I guess with regards to alignment.

So, ... let's consider participles. Let's assume participles are uniformly created by affixing some morpheme onto the verb stem. All verbs form their participle this way.

Let us reuse English words, and create the morphology as we go. The participle marker might be -b.

Thus
run - runeb
go - goeb
live - liveb
do - doeb
take - takeb
Now we run into the inverse alignment bit, and here we get the unusual twist. Instead of having an animacy hierarchy, we have each verb having a preferred voice. 

'Take', for instance, might prefer active, 'catch' might prefer passive. This is not so much regarding what one is likely to be doing, or even close to an animacy hierarchy, but close to which sense is likely to be used. You are more likely as a hunter-gatherer, for instance, to catch things and talk of things you've caught, than you are to talk of things that are catching things.

The inverse marker then would be a separate morpheme altogether, maybe at the opposite end of the word from the participle morpheme. It could also serve some other role in finite verbs (say, aspectual or temporal or some kind of congruence-like thing?) 
Let's imagine the inverse morpheme is a prefix: en-.
taking: takeb
taken: entakeb

caught: catcheb
catching: encatcheb
Now we get to a part where we can start varying our approach: intransitives. Maybe they're split? Maybe the split is a differential way of marking things (e.g. volition), or maybe it's lexically split.

Maybe intransitives exclusively use the marker that normally marks inverse? So now you'd get
enrun, engo
Just some thoughts.

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