We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Passives and Resultatives in Marshallese.
- Authors
Willson, Heather
- Abstract
In the literature, Marshallese verbs are often categorized as perfective or as passive. However, sentences containing perfectives and passives share numerous morphological, syntactic, and semantic similarities. As a result, it is difficult to tell whether these sentences are perfective or passive. In this paper, I examine perfective and passive verbs and sentences and provide semantic and syntactic evidence supporting the existence of two verb categories. First, I show that while passive verbs denote events, so-called perfective verbs denote the resulting state of events and are thus resultatives rather than perfectives. Second, I show that passive verbs are syntactically different from resultatives in that they may cooccur with an agent phrase preceded by in. Lastly, I make a case for the existence of a passive construction in Marshallese and argue that in is the head of a Voice projection.
- Subjects
MARSHALL Islands; VERBS; MARSHALLESE language; MEANING of meaning theory (Communication); FRAMES (Linguistics); LANGUAGE &; culture; OCEANIC languages
- Publication
Oceanic Linguistics, 2010, Vol 49, Issue 1, p233
- ISSN
0029-8115
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/ol.0.0059