Semantic and pragmatic inverse

A tale of two inverses

“…As shown most clearly by Gildea 1994, inverse patterns can be identified at both of the levels in (3). The two levels of inverse patterning can be defined as follows, in accord with Givón 1994: 8 and using Gildea's terminology, with subject position understood in generative terms as the highest A position in the clause.…”

“…In addition to connecting formal research on inverse systems to the functional-typological findings of Gildea 1994 andGivón 1994, the article identified connections between the inverse…”

“…Life cycle of an inverse (simplified from Gildea 1994: 222, Givón 1994 passive > deep inverse > deep and shallow inverses > shallow inverse…”

“…The nature of inverse patterns has been clarified in functional‐typological research (Givón 1990, Gildea 1994, Givón 1994). The key insight, using the terminology of Gildea 1994, is that the term inverse can be understood on two levels: inverse alignment is a morphological pattern in which the patient is indexed like a canonical subject, while inverse voice is a syntactic construction in which the patient is the subject. We can thus distinguish two kinds of inverses: a deep inverse , in which the morphology and syntax are both inverse, and a shallow inverse , in which the morphology is inverse but the syntax is not.…”

Hierarchical Agreement and Split Intransitivity in Reyesano

“…As we saw, in Reyesano, grammatical function disambiguation is (partly) fulfilled by a third-person A marker. In Carib and Tupi-Guarani languages, grammatical function disambiguation is performed by selecting a person marker from one of two formally distinct sets: set I if agreement is with the A and set 2 if agreement is with the O (see Gildea 1994, Payne 1997:214-15, and Rose 2003 forthcoming, among others). In several "Himalayish" languages of Nepal, as discussed by Watters (2006), the disambiguation can take the form of alternations affecting some parts of the verb root, such as the final consonant or a vowel.…”