Note sur les antécédents romantiques de la théorie de la passivité du verbe dans les études euskariennes

Abstract

During a long time (roughly from 1890 to 1960) most linguists held that Basque verbs have to be 'Passively conceived'. The ergative/absolutive case-marking and verb agreement morphology were given a corresponding syntactic interpretation, absolutive being considered as the subject case in all kind of sentences. The passive analysis was promoted in Basque studies by Muller (1885), Stempf (1890) and Schuchardt (1893). However, the paper shows that Chaho (1836) put forward a similar view half a century before. The main arguments Chaho used to demonstrate what he called the 'Philosophical unity' of Basque verbs are compared with those given by Stempf and Schuchardt at the end of the nineteenth century to establish the passive analysis.