NO. I
��REVIEWS
��sentence like HE KILLS THE BIRD WITH A STONE. A Blackfoot would express this in the following manner: THE BIRD BY-MEANS-
OF-IS-KILLED-BY-HIM A STONE. He who kills
is what is generally called the 'agent,' but in truth is only the apparent agent, the pri- mary instrument, which is itself controlled by a hidden power. The apparent agent, al- though itself dependent, works on the logical object (i.e., the grammatical subject) by its own emanating orenda; and even when it is the logical subject of an intransitive action, which is often the case in the mentality of peoples that recognize the contrast, not of transitive and intransitive, but of active and inactive, it works similarly by virtue of the same outstreaming mystic power. Therefore the energetic case, the exclusively transitive as well as the general active, can be called casus emanativus or 'case of outstreaming power.' When it is an active case, it can be more closely defined as the 'case of operative power;' when it is a transitive, as the case of power that operates on something else."
For us the main point of value in the paper is the fact that Uhlenbeck has striven to explain three distinct linguistic phenomena, each of which had been abundantly recog- nized as such, as symptomatic of one funda- mental feature, the passivity of the so-called transitive and active verbs. These phe- nomena are the close morphological resem- blance in certain languages between normal passive forms and at least certain transitive forms; the classification of verb-stems on the basis of singularity or plurality, according to the number of the intransitive subject and transitive object; and the frequent classifica- tion of pronominal elements into two groups that do not correspond to our normal sub- jective and objective (i.e., either into in- transitive subject and transitive object versus transitive subject, or into inactive subject and transitive object versus active subject). A few remarks on each of these points.
��Uhlenbeck's data for the first class of evi- dence are taken from Algonkin alone (Ojibwa and Blackfoot; Michelson's corroborative evi- dence for Fox is also referred to) . For certain Algonkin verb-forms there can, indeed, be no doubt that Uhlenbeck's findings are correct; but frankly I do not see that he has succeeded in showing that the Algonkin transitive as a whole needs to be interpreted as a passive. I would tend rather to feel that certain true pas- sives had been dragged for purely paradigmatic reasons into transitive company; e.g., Jones's Fox form for HE ME is evidently identical with his I as passive subject, and has morpholog- ically nothing to do with such true pronom- inally compound transitive forms as THOU ME. That the passive is unrelated to the true transitive in Fox, seems to me to be strongly suggested by the occurrence of two morpho- logically very distinct forms for the combin- ation of two third persons, a true transitive (e.g., HE SEES HIM), and a passive of the same structure as the HE ME and similar forms already instanced (this passive occurs in two distinct forms, an agentive, HE is SEEN BY HIM; and a non-agentive, HE is SEEN indefinitely). However, there no doubt are languages whose whole transitive is morphologically a true passive. This is notably the case with Yana, in which such a form as HE SEES ME is quite evidently to be interpreted as meaning properly i AM SEEN BY HIM; THOU SEEST ME, as i AM SEEN (BY THEE is merely implied); i SEE THEE, as THOU ART SEEN (BY ME is merely implied); and so on. Yet even where there is a close morphological resemblance between transitives and passives, it does not always follow that the transitives are of passive origin. Thus, in Takelma such a form as HE SEES ME is closely related to I AM SEEN, but is not derived from it. On the contrary, the passive is formed from the transitive by means of a suffix which differs for various tense-modes. Hence it seems plausible to interpret it as a sort of impersonal, though there is a true impersonal (with or without object) in
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