Transitivity & the "Notional Passive"

Transitivity

All Qohenje verbals can be either transitive or intransitive. The LM argument can be omitted from any verbal, sense permitting, forming an intransitive predication:

Prototypically intransitive verbals can be transitivized by adding an LM argument. The argument will be construed as the second most centrally involved entity (after the TR), depending on the meaning of the verbal, e.g.

This latter predication could also be expressed using a postpositional phrase:

The difference is one of perceived centrality of the hallway (in this example) to the profiled relation (sleeping). The first alternative makes the hallway into a central participant, whereas the second backgrounds it as a mere locus of activity. The difference is subtle. Consider also the following example:

In the first example the temple is deemed important to the event, whereas in the second, what is important is the fact that the children are singing, the temple is an incidental location. This pair of example sentences are reminiscent of the difference between The band will play the Odeon and The band will be playing at the Odeon.

Notional Passive

Qohenje therefore does not have an active/passive distinction, as it does not need one (intransitivization being invariably possible by simple omission of an LM argument). The syntax does however permit a construction type that is known as the notional passive.

All verbal lexemes have a natural orientation for their arguments: AG are most commonly TR, AB are more commonly LM, while PT tend to be divided between the two possibilities. The natural energetic flow of a proposition can be reversed however for various pragmatic reasons, giving the notional passive constructions. For instance, translating "The dog has bitten me" into its most natural structure gives,

with as TR, and as the LM. This respects the "billiard ball" model typical of Accusative syntax and languages that exhibit it. But Qohenje permits this same proposition to be expressed with its arguments the other way around, giving a sense that corresponds roughly to the English passive,

Note however that unlike the English passive, the verb remains unchanged, the structure is still transitive, and no core participants have been demoted to obliques... This is still a simple active transitive clause in Qohenje, despite its notionally passive meaning. Here we have a syntactic structure that is more Ergative in character.

Consider the distinction between the previous example and the following:

 

Although such "notional passive" structures are marked out as they correspond to a grammatical category in English, in Qohenje they are simply an expressive choice.

Qohenje does however have two real voice distinctions: the Ditransitive and the Circumstantial.