Re: Ergativity

--- Markus Miekk-oja <fam.miekk-oja@...>
wrote:

> "Cooked the rice" is not the best example, but
> in conditional clauses, there
> can be a 0-subject with presen-tense third
> person verbs, (that is without
> them actually having a real third person
> subject existing, just a "hypothethic person").

Well, you can have null subject verbs in any
person. To expand upon  the examples given:

"What did you do?" - "Cooked the rice."
"What did I do?" - "Cooked the rice."
"What did she do?" - "Cooked the rice."

Anyway, all of those are independent clauses.

> Similar constructions
> exist in other languages in
> non-conditional enviroments too. Finnish is
> quite restrictive as far as this
> goes, but in that context, empty subjects is
> allowed.
>
> But anyway, you can't say "if cooked the rice,
> then so and so" in English,
True, though beside the point.

> but you can basically do it in Finnish. This is
> used to express "universal
> conditionals" - "if one is sick, it pays off to
> eat medicine".
> My point was, just because English prohibits
> this, there's no reason to
> assume very nominative system does it,
I don't think that was the assumption.

> thereby there's no reason to assume
> that an ergative system must be limited in the
> same (but opposite) way as
> English (as far as what argument-dropping does
> to syntax goes) - when not
> even nominative systems aret limited in the
> same way as English.
True. There's always exceptions and a lot of rule
bending goes on in even the most conventional
language families!

Padraic.


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