Re: THEORY: Mixed erg/acc

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:

>> This kind of split-ergativity is found in Hindi and other Indo-Aryan
>> languages, and also (I think) in Georgian.  (A linguistics professor
>> of mine, Anoop Mahajan, has a neat story for explaining this pattern,
>> but I won't go into that unless asked...)
>>
>I'd like to hear his explanation, too - I've always thought
>the Indo-Aryan split ergative was caused by the participial
>way of speaking that was already prevalent in Sanskrit - which
>went with the instrumental. But I'm kind of vague about the
>real inner workings...
Mahajan's story is actually more of a series of observations than
a full-blown analysis.  It goes kind of like this:

(1)  Languages may express possession either by means of a
verb "have", or by using the copula "be" with the possessor
marked by an oblique case morpheme or adposition (typically
"to" or "with" or "by").  Hindi belongs to the latter camp,
so "I have a book" is "me by book COP" (or "by me is a book").

(2)  The perfective in languages like English is formed by
combining the past participle with "have".  The perfective in
Hindi is formed by combining the past participle with "be".

(3)  Some linguists have proposed that possessive "have" is
derived (synchronically) by combining "be" with an adposition.
Mahajan argues that this analysis should be extended to the
auxiliary "have" used in perfective constructions.

(4)  Languages can chose either to combine "be" with the
adposition to give "have", or to express "be" and the
adposition as separate morphemes.  English exploits the
former strategy while Hindi exploits the latter strategy.
In the case of the perfective in Hindi, the adposition is
identified as the ergative case suffix.  Thus, schematically
we have:

Possessive constructions:

Hindi:  BY-him  a book  IS
English:        he  HAS  a book

Perfective constructions:

Hindi:  BY-him  a book  WRITTEN IS     (BY = ergative case)
English:        he  HAS WRITTEN  a book

Under this story, it's no accident that perfectives in English
are formed using "have" rather than "be".  This analysis also
suggests close structural parallels between perfectives and
passives, which both use the same participle form in most
Indo-European languages:

        John   HAS READ   the book
        the book   IS READ   BY John

Both are derived from the deep structure "is read the book
by John".  In the passive construction, "the book" raises to
become the derived subject, giving "The book is read by John".
In the perfective construction, the preposition "by" incorporates
into "is", creating "has".  Deprived of its preposition, "John"
then raises to become the derived subject, giving "John has
read the book".  (This latter analysis was also independently
proposed by the Dutch linguist Teun Hoekstra.)

There's more to the story than that, but that's all I remember...

Matt.