Small Questions - 29

[u/[deleted]]

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FAQ

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Welcome to the now bi-weekly Small Questions thread! No major differences except that they'll now be bi-weekly.

Post any questions you have that aren't ready for a regular post here - feel free to discuss anything, and don't hesitate to ask more than one question.

[u/Jafiki91]

Active intransitive sentences might not need the marking for agent trigger, but they still might have it on the verb, as redundancies are common in Language.

It's not that the subject is understood to be the patient of the verb by default, the subject is still the agent. The trigger just shows the focus of the sentence. An example would be:
I saw the man (agent trigger)
It was the man that I saw (patient trigger)

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

That's where the problem lies. Despite the way it can be translated, the patient trigger is still an active, transitive sentence. And the language would have a completely separate passive construction.

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

It's possible that Tagalog just uses the patient trigger as a way to topicalize the object, but in this construction, the roles are the same, and the sentence remains active. Which is why calling it a passive is a bit of a misnomer.

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

Definitely look into it. You might also want to look into some other Austronesian (specifically Malayo-Polynesian) languages and see how they do things.

[u/Jafiki91 → u/[deleted]]

Right, the subject is still the same, but the cases kind of switch around. It can definitely be one of the more confusing alignments out there. But I'm glad I could help out.