Re: THEORY: Mixed erg/acc

Matt Pearson <jmpearson@...> wrote:

>>a) the 1st and 2nd person pronouns are marked NOM or ACC
>>   while the other argument is marked ABS or ERG, respectively,
>
>Alternative (a).  If the transitive subject is 1st/2nd person and
>the object is non-1st/2nd, then the subject is in the NOM form
>and the object is in the ACC form (i.e. both are unmarked).  If
>the transitive subject is non-1st/2nd and the object is 1st/2nd,
>then the subject is in the ERG form and the object is in the NOM
>form (i.e. both are marked).

How is NOM unmarked on a 1st/2nd-person subject while
marked on a 1st/2nd-person object? I mean, why call
it "nominative case" if it has two forms and one is
zero? Unless you meant ABS instead of NOM the last time...

What I had in mind was:

    1s.NOM hit dog.ABS     (a1)
OR  1s.NOM hit dog.ACC     (b1)
    'I hit the dog.'


    dog.ERG bite 1s.ACC    (a2)
OR  dog.ERG bite 1s.ABS    (b2)
    'The dog bites me.'

with ABS and NOM unmarked. Is either of these plausible?
Should I merge ACC and ABS? (That would make it more
like an active system, wouldn't it?). My current scheme
is (b)... with ERG also unmarked, except in (b2) (if
there's a 1st/2nd-person object, the ergative subject
is marked). The whole system rests on the assumption
that there *is* really an ergative system with a
NOM/ACC twist, based on some old case marks that are
currently used only for emphasis (topic or focus
marking, dislocated arguments, etc.) I could easily
go with (a), except that it looks a lot as if the
1st/2nd person pronouns just get a different case
ending (an allomorph) instead of a truly different
case.

Confused,


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/draseleq.html