[B-Greek] A new stab at voice
Kimmo Huovila
kimmo.huovila at helsinki.fi
Thu Oct 18 00:52:31 EDT 2007
A counter-example would be for example an active verb that has a patient as
subject and the agent as an object. Like "A verbed B" with meaning that "B
hit A". Another counter-example would be "A verbed B preposition C" with
meaning that C hit B with A. Another example: if an active voice sentence
has an agent, author, instrument, and patient, and the subject is one of
these, it is the agent.
I know this is just a quick and not thorough response. Nevertheless, I hope
this clarified it a little bit. If this is still completely cryptic, I'll try
to elaborate more later.
Kimmo
On Thursday 18 October 2007, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
>
> On Oct 17, 2007, at 12:24 PM, Kimmo Huovila wrote:
>
> > The hierarchy is agent>author>instrument>patient. The rule is that
> > the subject
> > of an active verb is not lower in the hierarchy than other roles in
> > the verb
> > frame.
> >
> >> b. What is the rationale for this hierarchy?
> >
> > I used William Frawley's Linguistc Semantics (1992), pp. 240-242.
> > He refers to
> > Charles Fillmore's The case for case (1968) and adds 'author' to
> > Fillmore's
> > subject hierarchy. I have understood subject hierarchy to be fairly
> > universal
> > in languages that have a clear subject category. I cannot think of
> > Greek
> > counter-examples. Subject hierarchy is discussed in many linguistic
> > sources,
> > I just happened to use Frawley.
>
>
> Kimmo,
>
> I suspect that the implications of "The rule is ..." are less than
> perfectly clear to some list members. I just looked at B.J.Blake's
> (Case, Cambridge 1994 page 91ff) discussion of C.Fillmore and S.Dik's
> use of hierarchy and I still don't understand what point you are
> attempting to make or what a Greek counter-example would look like.
>
>
> Elizabeth Kline
>
>
>
>
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