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Re: [Latejami] Re: Voice changes to argument structure?

In a message dated 7/16/2009 21:54:00 Eastern Daylight Time, FaqSphinx@hidden.email writes:


The impression I am getting is that valency and care requirments for verbs do not change with voice changes, but rather that topicality changes.

Is this the case?


The valency and case requirements do change when voice suffixes are added. The topicality also changes.  Changing the topicality is the motivation for changing the voice, which is done by adding voice suffixes.

Grammatical voice is discussed in section 2.7 Grammatical Voice.  Topicality is part of that discussion:

However, natural languages have many ways of changing the relative importance or topicality of a verb's arguments. Languages can also remove arguments from the argument structure, while implying that they still exist, and make the missing arguments either obliquely expressable or not expressable at all. Finally, languages can also incorporate normally oblique arguments, making them part of the argument structure of the verb.

stevo