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COPYRIGHT 2006 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
Abstract
This article attempts to lay the conceptual foundations of voice phenomena, ranging from the familiar active/passive contrast to the ergative/antipassive opposition, as well as voice functions of split case-marking in both transitive and intransitive constructions. We advance the claim that major voice phenomena have conceptual bases rooted in the human cognition of actions, which have evolutionary properties pertaining to their origin, development, and termination. The notion of transitivity is integral to the study of voice as evident from the fact that the so-called transitivity parameters identified by Hopper and Thompson (1980) and others are in the main concerned with these evolutionary properties of an action, and also from the fact that the phenomena dealt with in these studies are mostly voice phenomena. A number of claims made in past studies of voice and in some widely-received definitions of voice are shown to be false. In particular, voice oppositions are typically based on conceptual--as opposed to pragmatic--meanings, may not alter argument alignment patterns, may not change verbal valency, and may not even trigger verbal marking. There are also voice oppositions more basic and wide-spread than the active/passive system, upon which popular definitions of voice are typically based
1. Introduction
Current studies on voice phenomena suffer from a number of inadequacies at several levels of description and explanation. At the most fundamental level, there is no coherent conceptual framework that adequately addresses the matter, such that we are often left to wonder whether or not a given phenomenon falls in the domain of voice. For one thing, people differ in the treatment of causative and reflexive constructions; some consider them to represent voice categories, while others do not. Still others avoid raising the issue at all. Various definitions currently offered are of little use, as they are typically based on an Indo-European active/passive opposition, and arbitrarily include or exclude a particular phenomenon from the domain of voice. (1)
Properly identifying construction types representing a voice sub-domain is also a serious problem. In Crystal's (2003) definition (cf. Note 1) reflexives are not recognized as proper voice constructions and their relationship to the middle voice is not entirely clear. A similar problem is seen in Kemmer's (1993) extensive study of middle voice constructions.
There are also severe limitations at the level of explanation. Closer to the main theme of this volume is the problem of understanding the increases and decreases in valency and accompanying changes in argument structure observed in voice phenomena. Why do certain phenomena (e.g. the causative and applicative) show an increase in valency, while others (e.g. the passive and antipassive) typically have a valency-reducing effect? What motivates these valency changes in opposite directions?
Functional explanations regarding the distribution of certain voice constructions go a long way toward an explanatory functional study of grammatical phenomena (cf. Haiman 1985). Being largely based on formal properties such as "linguistic distance" and "full" vs. "reduced form," these explanations are not functional enough to be able to make more general predictions. (2)
The problems outlined above largely stem from two related methodological issues. One is the lack of a coherent conceptual framework for characterizing and analyzing voice phenomena; the other is an over-reliance on formal properties in both analysis and explanation. Clearly the latter problem is caused by the former and by the lack of commitment to the cognition-to-form approach in linguistic analysis. (3) The purpose of this article is thus to lay out a conceptual framework that coherently delineates the domain of voice, which embraces both those phenomena that are traditionally recognized as falling in the voice domain and those that have been kept in limbo. The framework required must deal with the fact that many voice phenomena straddle the semantics-pragmatics boundary, although the active/middle opposition is basically conceptual or semantic, and the active/passive opposition is largely pragmatic. We endeavor to unify these manifestations of voice function by assuming that the pragmatic relevance of clausal units is semantically determined in the first place.
The conceptual foundations of voice can only be arrived at by inspecting contrasting phenomena across languages. Our initial task is therefore to learn how a given language, using its own resources, achieves the goal of expressing a relevant conceptual opposition found in another language. While the ultimate goal of functional typology is to discover the correlative patterns between form and function, this article is concerned primarily with the initial task of postulating conceptual bases of voice phenomena and identifying constructions across languages that express the relevant oppositions.
One final introductory remark is due regarding the controversy over the question of whether the formal relationships between opposing voice categories should be treated as inflectional or derivational. We consider this question to be academic in the absence of rigorous definitions for these processes. In the realm of voice phenomena, some systems, for example, the Ancient Greek active/middle system, incorporate voice morphology in their inflectional paradigm. Others like the English active/ passive opposition do not show a simple morphological relationship--inflectional or derivational--since constructions as a whole enter into the formal opposition. The regularity or productivity of the pattern is often taken to be an important criterion distinguishing inflections from derivations; the former are thought to be regular and obligatory, while the latter allow exceptions. But regularity in natural language is always relative, and so are the patterns of voice oppositions. Even among the known ones, nothing is one hundred percent regular. An alternation that is well-integrated within the inflectional paradigm may show irregularity. In Ancient Greek, for example, we find both active forms that do not have middle counterparts (activa tantum) and middle forms lacking the corresponding active (media tantum). The active/passive opposition also shows a high degree of regularity, without ever being one hundred percent (as in the case of English), others place much severer limitations on the range of permissible passive constructions.
2. The evolution of an action: voice, transitivity, and aspect
The basic claim of this article is that major voice phenomena have their conceptual bases rooted in the human cognition of actions. Because such actions have various effects upon us, we have special interest in the way that they arise, how they develop, and the manner in which they terminate--what is referred to as the evolutionary properties or phases of an action in this article. Through a system of grammatical oppositions, a language provides a means for expressing conceptual contrasts pertaining to the evolutionary properties of an action that the speaker finds relevant for communicative purposes. Among the evolutionary properties, voice is primarily concerned with the way event participants are involved in actions, and with the communicative value, or discourse relevance pertaining to the event participants from the nature of this involvement.
Mention of the evolution of an action immediately brings to mind two other grammatical concepts, namely, transitivity and aspect. It is thus appropriate to clarify the relationships and differences between these notions. Traditionally, voice has been defined in reference to transitivity, or more narrowly in terms of the transitivity of a verb or clause; the active/ passive opposition most typically obtains with transitive verbs. A more important connection between transitivity and voice, however, lies in the notion of semantic transitivity, rather than strictly verbal or clausal transitivity. Indeed, it is easy to see this connection, as in the work of Hopper and Thompson (1980), where many of the phenomena discussed in terms of transitivity are nothing but voice phenomena. This important article concludes the section on grammatical transitivity as follows: "It is tempting to find a superordinate semantic notion which will include all the Transitivity components. If there is one, it has so far not been discovered ..." (Hopper and Thompson 1980: 279). Our claim is that what they are looking for is a theory of voice. In fact, the work of Hopper and Thompson lays important ground work for the study of voice. In this regard, Kemmer (1993: 247) is absolutely correct in noting that "the scale of transitivity ... forms the conceptual underpinning for voice systems in general, and for reflexive and middle marking systems in particular." (4) While none of these works makes...
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