After taking a little hiatus from my NisseLang project as I worked on other languages, I returned to my document today to refamiliarize myself with the language and to build more features for it. As a bit of cleaning up, I made some edits to the bipersonal-marking chart for the verbs (previously, I had kept long vowels in the forms, which didn’t make sense for an unstressed syllable and to support my vision for the language that it would no longer allow pro-drop situations—I needed more overlap in the bipersonal markings).
Then I scrolled through my master “to do” list of the language and landed on the active/passive section. It was fortuitous that I had just been playing around in my bipersonal marking chart because I had asked myself, “How often is this third-person inanimate subject marker going to be used (regardless of the object)?” My answer was staring right at me: as often as they use the passive construction.
I decided that rather than making a verb inflection to indicate passive voice, the verb index would use a third-person inanimate subject marker (with the appropriate object) and no subject would be specified in the clause structure. In other words, it is an underspecified subject to indicate an unknown referent.
As a quick example, here is “The squirrel threw a rock” and the related passive structure “The rock was thrown”:
- Àtínnúttatíte. (active)
- Àtínnúta. (passive)
In the passive structure, the object (“the rock”) is still marked as an object and occurs clause-initially (as objects do in this language), but the subject is no longer expressed.
Sometimes the goal of the passive voice is to pull attention or focus to the object, de-emphasizing, yet still expressing, the agent of the verb, as in “The rock was thrown by the squirrel.” I decided that, in NisseLang, there is no way to re-introduce an agent in a passive structure—if you want to (or can) express both arguments, then you do, and you use the active voice.
However, if you wanted to pull focus on one constituent or another, you can use a focus-marking construction, which is headed by the prepositional p’à- (which comes from the verb íp’a “to point (out/at)”) and occurs clause-finally. Any argument can occur in this construction, as in these examples:
- Àtínnúttatípp’àtíke. “It was a rock that was thrown by the squirrel.”
- Àtínnúttatípp’àtíte. “It was a squirrel that threw the rock.”
That construction introduces a new preposition into the language (the inventory will be limited). Figuring out two new pieces of the grammar in one session makes for a productive conlang day!