Re: Active again.

Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Daniel:
> > Piata (MNCL) is a "pure" active language in the sense that
> > it marks some S like P and some like A, but transitive
> > sentences are accusative.
> How would you tell the difference if it were ergative in transitive
> sentences?
I wouldn't, but when looking at the syntax (and especially
co-reference) it's clearly accusative. Interestingly though,
the syntax is also active.

"She hit him and ran" would be no problem because the left-out
subject of "ran" is AGT ("run" is a controlled event and thus
takes an AGT subject), i.e. the same as "she". This would mean
the same as in English.

But "She hit him and fell down" would mean that "he" fell down,
since the left-out subject of "fell" is PAT, i.e. the same as
"him" in the first clause. Thus:

     She:AGT hit him:PAT and [he:PAT] fell down.

If I wanted to say that "she" fell down, then I had to put
a marker for DIFFERENT on the second verb ("fell down") as
a way of saying that the implicit subject of this verb is
different from the subject in the first clause.

Hm. Looking at this gives me a feeling that the syntax is active
too. I'm gonna have to look at other syntactic features as well
to see what happens there.

Daniel Andreasson

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