Re: Ergativity
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, August 16, 2003, 1:24 |
|---|
Quoting Joe <joe@...>:
> English seems pretty pure accusative.
Not really. See "Ergativity in English" by Jerry Sadock, 1977,
"CLS Book of Squibs"
> I don't know enough about Ergative
> languages to give an example of one of them, but from what I've heard,
> Basque is a good example of a pure Ergative lang...
Not really. Basque is morphologically ergative, but syntactically
accusative. A better example of a more purely ergative language
would be Dyirbal. Even that, however, has an accusative pattern
in the first and second person pronouns.
=========================================================================
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