Valency-reduction in event-oriented languages
Søren Wichmann · 2007
2Abstract: It has been argued by Klimov (1974:18, 1977:316) that there is a bundle of features that characterize active language, among them the lack of a passive. I will try to establish whether the lack of a passive is, indeed, typical of active languages and, expanding upon the work of Klaiman (1991:128, 148-149), I will then go on to describe some characteristics of voice-like phenomena in selected active languages. I will argue that the notion of role- vs. reference-domination (Foley and Van Valin 1985) may explain the absence of promotional passives in stative-active languages, but that it fails to explain the voice-related phenomena that are actually present. Instead I will suggest a typological dichotomy of event- vs. participant-orientation. In participant-oriented languages, the construal of the relationships among participant takes precedence over the construal of the event and licenses the grammatical roles subject and object, which do not map directly onto the semantic roles agent and patient. In event-oriented languages it is not possible to simply turn any transitive event into an intransitive one by a process of verbal derivation. Sometimes, however, the lexicon makes available an intransitive predicate which is related semantically to the transitive one, notably when the two events form a causative-resultative pair.