TomHChappell wrote:How is that different from having voice for a participle or for a verbal noun (e.g. infinitive or gerund)?
I'm not sure about the nomenclature here, but I think it's a little different. I don't know of any language that has that sort of parallel between case and nominalisation. There's no actual morphological similarities between case and bicase, so I suppose you could call it voice instead. The form which says this word is ergative in relation to its defining predicate could be called "antipassive voice participle particle" instead of "ergative bicase marker". But I don't know what I would call the forms corresponding to things like locative. Since the forms mirror the list of cases, this seemed like the easiest way. And it felt odd to say that nouns have voice but verbs don't. Does that make sense?
TomHChappell wrote:Chuma wrote:"The dog with the hat sees the cat. It gives it to it." (i.e. the dog gives the hat to the cat)
dog.ERG hat.POSS see.ACT cat.ABS . give.ACT.OBL
I am not sure;
How, exactly do you know it's not, for instance, the hat that gives the cat to the dog?
I realised that wasn't a good example (I haven't really figured out how to handle 3-valent verbs) so I changed it. Sorry about any confusion.
There are two ways of seeing it, I think.
The first way is to think of it as voices. If we look at two-valent verbs, a "normal" language might have
active = the marked patient is the semantic patient, and the marked agent is the semantic agent
passive = the marked agent is the semantic patient, and the marked patient is the semantic agent (well, passive is normally valency-reducing, but we can imagine some language doing this)
reflexive = the single noun is both the semantic agent and patient
whereas CC has lots of combinations, like
active-active: the marked patient is the semantic patient, and the marked agent is the semantic agent
passive-passive: the marked agent is the semantic patient, and the marked patient is the semantic agent
active-passive: the marked patient is both semantic patient and agent
passive-active: the marked agent is both semantic patient and agent
active-oblique: the marked patient is the semantic patient, and something else is the semantic agent
passive-oblique: the marked agent is the semantic patient, and something else is the semantic agent
oblique-active: something else is the semantic patient, and the marked agent is the semantic agent
oblique-passive: something else is the semantic patient, and the marked patient is the semantic agent
oblique-oblique: something else is both semantic patient and agent
So to get back to my (new) example, "It chases it and drops it" can be
chase.ACT-ACT drop.OBL-ACT (the dog chases the cat, the dog drops the hat)
chase.PASS-PASS drop.ACT-ACT (the cat chases the dog, the dog drops the cat)
chase.OBL-ACT drop.PASS-OBL (the dog chases the hat, the hat drops the dog)
etc.
You can also think of it as polypersonal agreement.
Imagine instead of a pronoun "it" meaning basically "that which we were just talking about", there are separate pronouns for "that which we were just talking about in the absolutive", "that which we were just talking about in the ergative" and "that which we were just talking about in some other form". Now we just let the verb agree with both of them, and we don't even need to say the actual pronouns.
To extend the system, there are also a few other voices/agreements included. The full list is:
active
passive
oblique
1pers
2pers
imperative
directed ("that")
interrogative
vacant (none specified)
So in the example, you can add lots of other forms:
chase.ACT-1P (I chase the cat)
chase.2P-PASS (the cat chases you)
chase.OBL-INTG (who chases the hat?)
chase.INTG-2P (whom do you chase?)
chase.PASS-IMP (chase the dog!)
chase.PASS-VAC (the dog is being chased)
etc.
Valency 3 verbs don't come up very often, so I haven't worked much on them, but the idea is about the same, except the verb has a third voice/agreement as well.