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Adversatives

المؤلف:  PAUL R. KROEGER

المصدر:  Analyzing Grammar An Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  P279-C14

2026-02-04

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Adversatives

Another type of derivational process which changes the argument structure of the verb is the ADVERSATIVE. In Malay, the ke-X-an circumfix which we saw functioning as a nominalizer can also be used to form adversatives, as shown in (22) and (23). As these examples illustrate, the adversative construction changes an intransitive root into a transitive verb by adding a new argument, namely the person who suffers as a result of the event being described.

Adversatives are sometimes described as being special type of passive construction.⁹ Some languages, including Japanese, use the same affix for both the passive and the adversative. Compare the adversatives in (24b) and (25b) with the normal passive in (3b) above.¹⁰

Notice that the same passive suffix (-[r] are) is used in both constructions. In discussing example (3) we noted that passivization does not affect the argument structure of the clause: the same participants fill the same semantic roles in both active and passive. But in (24) and (25) we see that the adversative sentence contains an extra argument which is not found in the corresponding active sentence. This new participant is the person who is adversely affected by the action.

⁹. A number of Southeast Asian languages have passive constructions which are only used to express something unpleasant or undesirable. These so-called “adversative passives” are normal passives in terms of their syntactic effect. Unlike the adversative construction, they do not change argument structure but only affect the assignment of Grammatical Relations.

¹⁰. (24–25) are from Tsujimura (1996).