Re: Ergativity

>That's one possibility.  But consider the English "The rice cooked" or
>"This rice sells well".  In both cases, those are patients treated as
>
>
>subjects, but without any explicit marking on the verb of voice.
>
 Okay, perhaps I should have said the most likely way of doing it was to
have some way of marking the verb antipassive... but you've just helped
make my point...english treats "the rice" in the rice cooked as a
nominative even though the rice is actually the patient because a verb
in english must always have a nominative. You cannot say "cooked the
rice" to mean "the rice cooked". In ergatives it is supposed to be the
opposite, so I don't see how someone can say that an ergative language
would mark "Robert cooked" as

Robert-<erg> cooked

if in fact there is no abs, implied or explicit. It should be

Robert-<abs> cooked

whether the language uses an antipassive marking or just treats them the
same as in English. Otherwise I really don't see how you can call the
language ergative, because its (at least in some cases) grouping
together A & S instead of P & S.