Re: Ergativity

Quoting Muke Tever <muke@...>:

> From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>
> > 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!
>
> Actually, I think that for most animate subjects that "X cooks" cannot be
> interpreted in more than _one_ way.  It's only when animacy is low enough
> that
> "X cooks" can be read in middle voice.
>
> (A split-system?)
I may've spent too much time in Maggelophonistan, but the idea of cooking
someone called Robert isn't that wild. I'm of course not a native speaker, but
it seems really strange to me people couldn't be treated the same as soup in
this instance (you certainly can with Swedish _att koka_, which is otherwise
entirely parallel to English "to cook" here).

                                                     Andreas