Friday, February 26, 2016

Detail #258: A Really Weird Voice

To come up with bizarre voices, one needs to come up with bizarre restrictions that make them reasonable. One imaginable restriction that could make such a thing reasonable would be this: subject pronouns can only refer to previous subject nouns, whereas object pronouns can refer to subjects as well as objects.

Consider then something like:
I wrote a book. It flopped.
"It" cannot refer to 'book', due to the previous restriction. So, there's a voice that moves subjects to objects, and leaves the subject spot empty. Thus:
I wrote a book. flopped-BIZARROVOICE it.
This voice could of course also take on other uses: change the scope of negation:
a student did not arrive can only mean a specific student did not arrive. However, did not arrive-BIZARROVOICE a student can mean 'not a student arrived', i.e. no student arrived.
The voice could imply lack of volition, or somesuch?. It could further have the regular object either be demoted to some kind of oblique position, or maybe permit for double (and even triple?) objects. Maybe a subj→obj→ind.obj→obl hierarchy exists. A quirk on that could be that things only are demoted if they are pushed, so e.g. an indirect object only turns oblique if there's a direct object that is demoted.




No comments:

Post a Comment