Re: Ergativity

Joe wrote at 2003-08-15 21:11:08 (+0100)
 > ----- Original Message -----
 > From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>
 > To: <CONLANG@...>
 > Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 7:15 PM
 > Subject: 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.
 > >
 > > Does this mean that there are purely accusative languages around?
 >
 > English seems pretty pure accusative.  I don'tknow enough about
 > Ergative languages to give an example of one of them, but from what
 > I've heard, Basque is a good example of a pure Ergative lang...
 >

Even English has some ergative features.  For example, the
nominalizing suffix -ee, as mentioned by Jörg Rhiemeier above.

And I'm pretty sure that Basque isn't purely ergative.  I don't think,
for example, that it has syntactic ergativity of the "He hit her and
ran away" kind.  I don't know enough of Basque to give any kind of
example, but in this book review[1] Larry Trask (an authority on
Basque) says

 | There is no known language which is wholly ergative. Instead, every
 | ergative language exhibits ergativity in some circumstances but not
 | in others, and the range of observed ergative systems is enormous,
 | though the differences are not arbitrary.


[1]http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/trask.html