1367260110.5528Understanding Syntax

Words belong to different classes 45(28) a. Kalulu a-na-b-a mkazi wa njovu. (Chichewa)hare Su-past-steal-aspect wife of elephant‘The hare stole the elephant’s wife.’b. Mkazi wa njovu a-na-b-edw-a (ndi kalulu).wife of elephant Su-past-steal-passive-aspect by hare‘The elephant’s wife was stolen (by the hare).’In both Chichewa and English, the passive affects the arguments of the verb, and alsothe form of the verb itself. The noun phrase mkazi wa njovu, ‘the elephant’s wife’, is thedirect object in (28a), and becomes the subject in the passive (28b): in the terminologyintroduced in Chapter 1, it gets promoted to subject position. The subject of theactive sentence, kalulu, ‘the hare’, is demoted in the passive: it becomes the object of apreposition ndi/by, or it can be omitted entirely. The valency of the ‘steal’ verb is alteredin the passive: in (28a), it takes two core arguments, a subject and a direct object,while in (28b), it has only one core argument: mkazi wa njovu, ‘the elephant’s wife’.The phrase ndi kalulu ‘by the hare’ is not a core argument: it can be omitted entirely.The passive in English is characterized by an auxiliary be or get (as in It got stolen)plus the past participle form of the main verb (stolen, seen, killed) but there’s nospecific passive affix. Chichewa, however, marks the passive directly on the verb,using the -edw suffix in (28b).2.2.2.4 AgreementVerbs in many languages ‘agree with’ one or more of their arguments (see Chapter 6).This means that various properties of the noun phrase arguments are also markedon the verb, the most common properties being person and number, and then genderor noun class. The situation most familiar to speakers of European languages is thatof subject/verb agreement. English has very little verbal agreement – only the thirdperson singular in the present tense is overtly marked (for example, I play versus Heplays). This is the dual role of the -s suffix mentioned earlier: it represents both 3sgand present tense.The Australian language Gunin also has subject/verb agreement, but in Gunin itis the gender of the subject that is cross-referenced (morphologically marked) onthe verb, as shown in (29). Gunin has five genders, one denoting all humans (maleor female) and four covering all non-human nouns (see Section 2.3.3.2 for moreon gender).(29) a. benyjin bi-yangga (Gunin)man gender-goes‘The man is walking.’b. leewa gadi a-yanggadog run gender-goes‘The dog is running.’Cross-linguistically, verbs often agree with their objects as well as their subjects. Thisexample is from a Malayo-Polynesian language, Kambera: