Re: Is this a passive?
| From: | Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, July 24, 2003, 1:24 |
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Joe wrote:
> The same happened in Sanskrit and the Indic languages. This makes the past
> tense Ergative, to some degree.
Right, except that the Indic languages kept the ergative structure in
the past tense, whereas Iranian changed it. So that to say "The man
fell" you'd say "man-abs fell" but "the man dropped the book" is
"man-oblique book-oblique fell".
Incidentally, there's a universal that if a language has
split-ergativity by tense or aspect, the past or perfect will be
ergative, and the present or imperfect accusative
--
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