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Article: 4. Pragmatically motivated voice systems.(On the conceptual framework for voice phenomena *)
- Article from:
- Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
- Article date:
- March 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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While pragmatically motivated voice systems may appear to have little to do with the manner in which an action evolves, they can still be framed in the overall picture of voice as pertaining to the evolutionary properties of an action. Both the direct/inverse and the active/passive opposition concern the origin of an action and its relative discourse status with respect to the terminal point--for example, whether or not the action originates with a first person and terminates in a third person.
First, let us consider the direct/indirect opposition, exemplified by the Plains Cree and Kutenai examples below:
Plains Cree
(46) a. ni-se:kih-a-wak. ...