All Questions
Tagged with passive morphology
3 questions
4
votes
3
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Can ergative languages have a passive construction?
I've recently started reading more about ergative languages, such as Basque.
I understand that cases in ergative languages differ from nominal-accusative languages.
For example, a sentence like "...
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Are there languages with free argument order that lack a passive voice? If not, why not?
Consider German, with its four cases and relatively free argument-order.
Now consider the following German sentence, courtesy of Google Translate.
Johan schenkte dem Mädchen eine Katze. (Johan gave ...
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1
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Assuming that passives need verbal morphology, which languages commonly said to have a passive do not actually count?
Among others, I recently read the passive definition by Martin Haspelmath (from THE GRAMMATICIZATION OF PASSIVE MORPHOLOGY, 1990), which states (page 26/27 of the book, the second/third page of the ...
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