Re: Ergativity

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 8:05 AM
Subject: Re: Ergativity


> Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:
>
> > But, here's my question.  If a language marks nouns with S & P one way,
> > and A another, but verbs agree with S & A, and S/A is an obligatory
> > argument, what would you call it?  It's not purely ergative, and it's
> > not purely accusative.  I suppose you could call it "mixed", but then in
> > that case, there'd be no language on Earth that would be called
> > "ergative".  Ergative languages generally have at least *some*
> > accusative features.
>
> I think the question should be: does it make sense to speak of
> "ergative" vs. "accusative" languages at all? Many unquestionably
> 'accusative' languages have ergative traits as well; a whole book
> has been written on ergativity in German alone.  To put it another
> way, the question that we should be asking is: what causes ergativity
> and accusativity to arise in languages in the distributions that
> they have?
I don't know.  The most logical system to me would seem to be a split-S one.
One that has two cases for S, one the same as A, the other the same as P.  I
suppose I'd call the two cases Subjective and Objective.  So, 'Robert
cooked' would be 'Robert<sub> cooked', whereas 'The window broke' would be
'window<obj> broke'.


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> Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
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