Re: Ergativity

Quoting Phillip Driscoll <phild@...>:

> > Thomas R. Wier trwier@UCHICAGO.EDU wrote:
> >
> > Rob Haden wrote:
> > > 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.
>
> This seems to be the widely held definition of intransitivity, but
> there are some problems with it. Consider the sentences
>
>   1. Robert cooked the rice.
>   2. Robert cooked.
>   3. The rice cooked.
[...]

> to give the sense that Robert was performing the action of cooking
> and was not being cooked. Clearly for a sentence to be intransitive,
> the subject needs to be the patient (whether or not it's also the agent).
The problem with your account is that you are confusing thematic
roles with grammatical roles.  The two are regularly treated differently
in all languages I know of.  In Meskwaki, for example, an antipassive suffix
creating sentence (2) "cook (something)" above has intransitive
morphology distinct from the transitive version of (1), but which
it shares with the middle construction in (3).  I suggest you read
F. Palmer's book "Grammatical Relations" for his discussion of the
need to distinguish grammatical and thematic roles.

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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
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637