Re: Ergativity
| From: | Phillip Driscoll <phild@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, August 8, 2003, 4:38 |
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> 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.
Sentence 1 is clearly transitive; sentence 3 is intransitive.
By your definition, sentence 2 is intransitive, but clearly the
subject in sentence 2 underwent an experience not substantially
different from the subject of sentence 1. In both sentences,
Robert is an agent.
On the other hand, the subject in sentence 3 underwent an
entirely different experience, akin to the experience of the direct
object in sentence 1. This becomes more clear in an ergative
system. Sentence 1 might be marked as
1. Robert-<erg> cooked the rice-<abs>.
and sentence 3 as
3. The rice-<abs> cooked.
But what do we do with sentence 2? If we treat it as intransitive
and mark it as
2. Robert-<abs> cooked.
this would give the impression that Robert underwent the same
type of experience as the rice, i.e. he was boiled until tender.
Clearly sentence 2 would need to be marked as
2. Robert-<erg> 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).
--Phillip Driscoll
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