Chris Bates wrote:
>
> If that is true then it seems to remove most of the point of ergativity.
I don't see why.
> And does Japanese inflect verbs for person?
Nope. You can say:
Robert nom rice acc cook-past
Robert nom cook-past
Rice acc cook-past
Cook-past
> Robert-<erg> cook-past-3rdpersonsingabs
>
> But the sentence is still transitive so an erg is allowed.
Certainly. If the language has personal inflection, and that inflection
is on an ergative basis. There are languages that have ergative marking
on nouns but verbal marking that's on an accusative basis.
> And by my understanding in ergative languages if a verb is
> intransitive then the argument it takes is abs.
If the language has personal inflections, and the ergativity extends to
verbal agreement, certainly.
> I still
> think that if there is no abs that has been dropped just robert cooked,
> it should be marked
>
> Robert-<abs> cook-past-antipassive
>
> Or some antipassive construction should be used.
That's one possibility. But consider the English "The rice cooked" or
"This rice sells well". In both cases, those are patients treated as
subjects, but without any explicit marking on the verb of voice.
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