Re: Fifth morphosyntactic category?

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 09:57:53 +0200, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

>On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 00:30, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>> Can't remember what you call the ones that make no distinctions...
>>
>> Agent, Patient, Intransitive...
>>
>> A!=P!=I Tripartite
>> A=P!=I Monster Raving Loony
>> A!=P=I Ergative
>> A=I!=P Accusative
>> A=I=P ?
>
>"The clairvoyant's option", at least according to
>http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/r.html (which is where I
>assume you got the label "Monster Raving Loony" from).
>
>I'm not sure what JBR's F) is called -- is that fluid-S? (Where a
>voluntary experiencer is treated like an agent, an involuntary one
>like a patient.)
Yes, (F) is an example of Fluid-S. Fluid-S is when certain verbs can take
either and agentive/intentional/volitional or
patientive/unintentional/nonvolitional reading; Split-S is when verbs are
divided into two groups on some semantic basis - unergative vs unaccusative
being one example.

-Pfal
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"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words;
on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them
unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
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