Re: Participles in ergative languages

I'll answer your questions for Basque, an ergative language spoken in
the North of Spain.
> 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)?
>
The perfective form of Basque verbs is also a passive perfective
adjective. For example:

galdu dut
lost 3rd.abs-TRANS-1st.erg
"I have lost it"

ardi galdu-a
sheep lost-DEF
"the lost sheep"

Basque also has a verbal noun form, in this case galtze "losing". It
does not really have any way of forming an active/imperfective adjective
from a verb root, like the English "loving". Note that the English
"loving" can be used both as a noun and as an adjective, whereas the
Basque -tze form can only be used as a noun.

> 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?
Basque has a special form for this, originally derived from the verbal
noun + locative. Example:

sagar bat jaten dut
apple one eat-IMP 3rd.abs-TRANS-1st.erg
"I am eating an apple"

"jaten" is the verbal noun "jate" + n. This form with n cannot be used
as either a noun or an adjective, only as a verb with an auxilliary...
Note, though, that not all languages mark progressives etc by means of
an auxilliary and particle or similar construction. Basque does because
it uses auxilliaries for practically everything anyway, but many
languages use TAM morphology instead. In that case, the question would
not arise since no participle-like form would be involved.

> 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).
You can do this in Basque too. Example:

ni sagar bat jaten ari naiz
I apple one eat-IMP do 1st.abs-be
"I am eating an apple"

I've included both arguments explicitly so you can see that both are in
their unmarked ABS form. This only really occurs in Basque in this
particular progressive construction... I can't think of any other
construction where actor and patient both get marked with ABS.

So there are two possible ways of translating "I am eating an apple in
Basque":

(ni-k) sagar bat jaten dut

(ni) sagar bat jaten ari naiz

The first is the general imperfective construction, the second is
explicitly progressive.