For example, a sentence translating to 'The falling lamp hit John' may be paraphrased as something akin to 'The falling lamp hit at John'. Specifically, they may prevent the casting of a highly animate argument as an object in the absolutive case and/or of a low-animacy argument as a subject in the ergative case. They may be a way of avoiding atypical mapping between the relative or absolute animacy level of an argument and its syntactic function.Alternatively, the patient may be only incompletely affected, as in 'John is pulling at the chair', as opposed to 'John is pulling the chair'. For example, the focus may be on the agent's general propensity to perform the action, as in 'John makes great cakes'. They may show that the focus is on something else than the actual result of the action.This can be compared with the use of the passive in nominative-accusative languages such as English to deemphasise or omit the agent: 'The man was bitten (by a dog)' or 'The man is often bitten'. ![]() For example, antipassives may be used in sentences that translate to 'The dog bites (people in general)' or 'The dog bit a man'. because it is indefinite or generic, or the construction can be a way of omitting the patient altogether (which may otherwise even be ungrammatical in certain ergative languages).
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