Re: Ergativity

Quoting Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:

> Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:
> > 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?
It is probably the case that all languages have both ergative
and accusative features, differing only in their distributions.
This is an understudied field, but both German and English are
said to have some ergative features. A whole book has been
written on the phenomenon in German.

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