4min chapter

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Conlangery #25: Grammatical Voice

Conlangery Podcast

CHAPTER

The Anti-Passive in Ergative Languages

In English we can have a passive and still mention the agent of the verb. We use the preposition by. I was hit by a car. But there's other voices like anti-passive which is kind of the opposite of passive, right? That's what it means. Some languages you remove the object, it's gone forever. And in others you can have an oblique. Unless you need it there to complete the sense but you're not talking about specific things. In Nez Perce these nice Sahapthian languages has an anti- passive. So you can either say I went collecting ... clams. They've probably got dozens of names for clams.

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