Re: Ergativity

Quoting Rob Haden <magwich78@...>:

> On Tue, 5 Aug 2003 17:26:57 -0500, Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
> wrote:
>
> >Your situation is not clear, because I cannot tell whether the
> >genitival marker is syntactically associated with the first
> >argument ("me") as a kind of postposition, or with the second
> >argument ("you") as a preposition. (If your language adheres
> >to Greenbergian universals, with an SOV language you would have
> >postpositions, not prepositions.) If the former, as a postposition,
> >you do not have an ergative language, because the single argument
> >of your two putatively intransitive constructions can be marked
> >either as patient or as agent.  As such, your language would be
> >a split-S or, more likely, a fluid-S language. If the genitival
> >marker is associated with the second argument in the transitive
> >construction, then you still do not have an ergative language,
> >as the first argument is marked the same in all three examples.
>
> Yes, 'n(w)a' is a postposition.
>
> I'm sorry but I don't see how my second example sentence is intransitive.
> To me, it still implies a direct object.  But I think that's due more to
> the verb involved ('eat').
Semantics have no (direct) effect on transitivity.  Take the English
triplet "dine", "eat", and "devour".  In each case, there is some notional
entity being eaten, but each verb has different syntax from the other
two.  "Dine" in always intransitive: *"I dined the food". "Eat" is
optionally intransitive: "I ate the food" ~ "I ate". "Devour" is
always transitive:  *"I devoured".  The test of transitivity is a word's
behavior in syntax (adjusting for the possibility of elision); there
is no Platonic "transitivity" floating in grammatical space here.

In your second case, you gave no indication that any argument of the
verb had been elided. Thus, it was reasonable to assume that the word,
though having a notional object, had no syntactic object.  I suggest
that your system is most likely a fluid-S system, since the marking
an intransitive verb may take depends to a certain extent on agentive
volitionality and (more to the point in this example) agentive control.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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