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Re: THEORY: Mixed erg/acc

From:FFlores <fflores@...>
Date:Saturday, March 11, 2000, 14:33
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