Getting Koa's valence-decreasing house in order

It's become increasingly clear this week that I don't really understand valence-decreasing operations in Koa. I created pa very early on as a passive marker -- whatever that exactly means in practice -- and seem to have identified hi as a reflexive prefix, but that about sums it up: no further exploration or description has taken place in all these years. Here are some questions that need to be answered:

1. Can the agent of a passive verb be overtly indicated? If so, how?
2. How does the passive work with ditransitive verbs?
3. How do reflexives work? Is it just a verbal prefix? Or is it a pronoun? If a pronoun, can it appear in other syntactic positions?
4. Can pronominal objects in fact appear preverbally?
5. Is there a way to background the subject, or make it indefinite/impersonal, without using the passive? (Like aquí se habla español "Spanish is spoken here" or ווערטער זאָל מען װעגן און ניט צײלן verter zol men vegn un nit tseyln "words should be weighed, not counted)
6. If there's some kind of impersonal construction, does it matter if the logical agent is human or not?
7. What's the relationship, if any, between reflexives and impersonals?
8. How do we represent reciprocal action, and how is that different from reflexives?

There's a lot of material here and I'm not sure if this is destined to be a single post or several. I guess we might as well go through them one at a time...

1. Indicating agents of passive verbs

It's been a long time since the typology class where we looked at a thorough cross-linguistic survey of agents in passive constructions, so I've been extremely grateful for this paper by Edward Keenan and Matthew Dryer providing exactly that. I needed some help with agent demotion because I knew it was most common for them to be relegated to an oblique position, but it was extremely unclear which Koa adjunct particle would be appropriate. Meanwhile, the only passive agent indication in current active use has been phrases like

pa-lóha-ni
PASS-love-1SG
"my beloved"

From the above it should be possible to say

se palóhani
2SG PASS-love-1SG
"you are my beloved"

...and if this is written out with the particles separated, you end up with

se pa loha ni
2SG PASS love 1SG
"you are my beloved" = "you are loved by me"

This makes it look like passivization in Koa -- at least by means of the particle pa -- is in fact not a valence-decreasing operation at all! Instead, Loglan-style, the subject and object are simply swapped, with pragmatic consequences. Further examples if this is true:

se loha iu poli pi mehe
2SG love EXT many QUANT person
"you love so many people"

se pa loha iu poli pi mehe
2SG PASS love EXT many QUANT person
"you are loved by so many people"

Initially I figured this kind of linguistic backflip wasn't really possible for humans, and therefore should be considered inadmissible. The best I could do was to suppose that palóhani breaks down to [[palóha]ni], like we start out with "beloved person" -- palóha -- and add personal possession: now it's ka palóha kémeni, "my beloved person." Maybe it doesn't literally mean "the one who is loved by me"...as much as it really, really, really, really looks like it does.

Keenan and Dryer, though, point out that some languages really do do this, particularly in the Bantu family. Here's one of their Swahili examples:

maji ya-meenea nchi
water it-cover land
"the water covers the land"

nchi i-meenea maji
land it-cover water
"the land is covered by water"

Here there isn't even any kind of passive marker, just verb agreement with a different subject. Bottom line, this may in fact be a viable Koa strategy. What if we do want an adjunct, though, whether for clarity or for semantic or pragmatic reasons? One strategy is an ablative -- so o in Koa -- but that seems a little ad hoc and apparently some kind of instrumental is more common cross-linguistically.

Only...Koa doesn't have an unambiguous instrumental. I've deferred serious consideration over the years, imagining (or hoping) that other particles might be sufficient: going in a car, or writing with a pen, etc. When it comes down to it, though, I really do want to be able to talk straightforwardly about means. If kelo is "reason" and kemo is "manner," what would "means" be?

After a few days of pondering, I think this is important enough to assign one of our newly available c- particles to. Initially I'd chosen ca but no amount of familiarity seemed able to make that feel right, so I switched it to ci at about 3am last night and I'm pretty happy with that. So:

ni kanu ka tue ci kivi
1SG injure DEF finger INSTR rock
"I hurt my finger with/on a rock"

se ia te puhu ci le Koa
2SG CERT ABIL speak INSTR NAME Koa
"you really can speak Koa"*

ta miilo ve ka kala ta i si pa iune ci mola
3SG INCEPT-know REL DEF fish 3SG VP ANT PASS steal INSTR bear
"he discovered his fish had been stolen by a bear"

*Usage here hasn't been formally decided. Should it be ci le Koa "by means of Koa" like Hungarian, or mo le Koa "in the manner of Koa, Koa-ly" like Polish or Latin? Or (probably not) ne le Koa like English? Seems like ci is most appropriate semantically but a final decision can come later.

By the way, I may have also decided in the midst of this instrumental study that the word for "and" should just be e plain and simple. I've had me conjoining NP's -- influence from Swahili -- but I'm not sure what that gets me in exchange for additional semantic ambiguity (did I really buy a house with a car, or just a house and a car separately?). I can't imagine that letting go of this would upset any learner regardless of linguistic origin.

Getting back to the original question, yes, this kind of passive can indeed have an overt agent phrase: (1) definitely headed by ci, our new instrumental, and (2) maybe even as a plain NP that looks like a core argument. Still unanswered is what's really going on here with valence at a lower level, particularly in view of option (2), so we'll need to come back to this.

2. The passive of ditransitives

In English a person can be given a book, and a book can be given to a person, within the same apparent passive structure. What about Koa? The answer seems to hinge on how ditransitives are handled in active clauses, about which I'm honor-bound to admit sheepishly that I'm not sure. If both the direct and indirect objects are full NP's I think one of them has to be phrased as an adjunct to avoid modifying the other:

A. ta ana ka lelu la ka toto
3SG give DEF toy DAT DEF child
"he gave a toy to the child"

B. ta ana ka toto pe ka lelu
3SG give DEF child APPL toy
"he gave the child a toy"

??ta ana ka toto ka lelu
3SG give DEF child DEF toy
"he gave the toy's child..."

What's less clear is what happens when the indirect object is a pronoun. I'm not sure why this shouldn't work:

ta ana ni ka lelu
3SG give 1SG DEF toy
"he gave me the toy"

I guess we're kind of begging the question, though, because as soon as we're saying that both of those ana clauses above are acceptable, it's clear that it must be possible to promote either the direct or indirect object. I guess I'll go ahead and say yes, this is permissible, until I find a good reason to forbid it. For what it's worth I think Yoruba agrees. So then, the passives would look...like this, I think?

A. ka lelu i pa ana la ka toto (ci ta)
DEF toy VP PASS give DAT DEF child (INSTR 3SG)
"the toy was given to the child (by him)"

B. ka toto i pa ana (pe) ka lelu (ci ta)
DEF child VP PASS give (APPL) DEF toy (INSTR 3SG)
"the child was given the toy (by him)"

Oof, this is getting complicated. I'm not sure whether the pe in structure B is obligatory, despite the fact that it would have been in the active sentence -- once the two objects aren't piled up anymore, the ambiguity disappears! And while we're trying to figure that out, if it might be possible to free agents from an adjunct phrase like we were saying before, might this be an acceptable rephrasing of type A?

A. ka lelu i pa ana ta la ka toto
DEF toy VP PASS give 3SG DAT DEF child
"the toy was given by him to the child"

In this case, the literal translation would look something like "the toy was his given thing (i.e. his gift) to the child." Even though this surprises my IE intuition, I really don't see why this shouldn't be okay! And I actually kind of love it.

Getting back to B above, I think it's better with pe omitted: included, it's acceptable but not really helpful. It's the same as the fact that we can theoretically say

ni ipo pe ka cai
1SG drink APPL DEF tea
"I drank [with respect to] the tea"

...but the circumstances where a speaker would naturally choose to do that would be pretty specific. At least 99% of the time you'd just get ni ipo ka cai.

This is already long enough that I think I should leave 3-8 for separate posts...and I haven't forgotten that there's some really important material still waiting to be written about nominalization and relativization! I'll do my best over Thanksgiving break.