Re: Ergativity

Chris Bates wrote:
>
> Okay, I give in... *sigh* I don't want to argue anymore lol... even
> though it makes no sense to me whatsoever I accept that people call
> languages that do that ergative. I just don't accept that it makes
> sense... I'm a mathematician, we like clear cut definitions for all our
> terms.
Well, mathematics is one of the few areas that allows for absolute,
clear-cut divisions.  :-)  There's just no way to divide languages
easily and uncontroversially into types.  Labels are just conveniences.
Just as there's no such thing as a purely isolating, or purely fusional,
or purely agglutinating language, so there's no such thing as a purely
ergative language.  It's a matter of degree.  Some languages, such as
Hindi will even use ergative marking in the past tense, but accusative
marking in the present tense.  :-)

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.

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