Re: Antipassive + Split-Transitivity = Bleeding Head

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

All languages have a way of not mentioning the agent.
[...]

Not all languages have a grammatical way of mentioning the agent in a
deemphasized position.

These two statements along should be a hint that the semantic and
pragmatic role of the passive is not necessarily the same in all
languages, which, as I read it, the OP suggests.

Therefore, "emphasized" is too unspecific a term. The subject position,
which is abandoned for the agent in the passive, is not necessarily an
"emphasized" position. For example, in German it is not. There, emphasis
is applied to a word by stress and sometimes by shifting the word towards
the *end* of the sentence, that is, *away* from the standard subject
position (1st or 3rd in the sentence).

The interaction between Subject and Topic has been being explored for
decades.

Indeed. My contribution was meant as a recurrence to a hopefully
well-known example, not as an original publication of new insight.

--
Helmut Richter
.