Re: Ergativity

Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:

> But, here's my question.  If a language marks nouns with S & P one way,
> and A another, but verbs agree with S & A, and S/A is an obligatory
> argument, what would you call it?  It's not purely ergative, and it's
> not purely accusative.  I suppose you could call it "mixed", but then in
> that case, there'd be no language on Earth that would be called
> "ergative".  Ergative languages generally have at least *some*
> accusative features.
I think the question should be: does it make sense to speak of
"ergative" vs. "accusative" languages at all? Many unquestionably
'accusative' languages have ergative traits as well; a whole book
has been written on ergativity in German alone.  To put it another
way, the question that we should be asking is: what causes ergativity
and accusativity to arise in languages in the distributions that
they have?

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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