Re: Ergativity

Quoting takatunu <takatunu@...>:

> Andreas wrote:
> <<<
> Note that (2) is ambiguous - it can mean either that Robert is cooking
> something, or that something is cooking Robert. It seems to me the easiest
> to
> say we've simply got two verbs "to cook" here, one a causative, one an
> intransitive.
> >>>
>
> Why not three verbs?
Because "Robert cooks", to my knowledge, cannot be interpreted in more than
two ways!

(And yes, I understood your point, and I guess there's no reason one couldn't
analyze the transitive sentence as involving a third separate verb. However,
that analyzis would create large numbers of doublettes - whereas there's to my
knowledge only a few cases where the object of a transitive can become the
subjected of a corresponding non-passive sentence - which suggest to me that
we're looking at a general ability of large classes of English transitives to
omit the object.)

                                                 Andreas

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