Re: Participles in ergative languages

Regarding 2, the English could certainly be parsed as a copula plus an
adjective made up of a present participle, and that could certainly be
the way your conlang tackles the problem. On the other hand, it is
more common (at least among natlangs) to make use of the imperfective
aspect, which does away with the problem of participles here.

2006/10/16, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...>:
> I'm wondering if anyone has some insight into how participles are
> used in ergative languages that have participles. (I am working on
> making a daughter language of an ergative protoconlang created by
> someone else.) I have a few issues with understanding them:
>
> 1. Voice. AFAIK, in accusative languages there are different
> participles for different voices, e.g. active and passive -- thus
> "loving" is an active participle, because it describes someone who is
> an agent of loving; and "loved" is a passive participle, since it
> describes someone who is a patient of loving. Do ergative languages
> have e.g. an active participle, an antipassive participle, etc.?
> (Actually, I'm not even sure if it is correct to call the usual voice
> "active".) Do they have a passive participle, even if the actual
> verbs don't recognize a passive category (which, AFAIK, some ergative
> languages don't)?
>
> 2. If I want to say "I eat an apple", I would put "I" in the ergative
> and "apple" in the absolutive. But what do I do if I want to say "I
> am eating an apple", using a participle? On the one hand, I can
> imagine using those same cases, but on the other hand, it seems like
> you could conceive of the whole phrase "eating an apple" as
> adjectival, and I think ergative languages generally use the
> absolutive for the subject of an adjectival predicate. I.e. both "I"
> and "apple" would be in the absolutive (unless of course the
> participle would require its objects to be specified in an oblique
> case, like the genitive). My intuition is that the choice of cases
> would depend on how grammaticalized the copula+participle
> construction is -- whether it's considered a periphrastic verb or
> simply the conjunction of a copula and a participle, parallel to
> conjunctions of copula and adjective or noun.
>