Re: Ergative + Accusative?

The Gray Wizard <dbell@...> wrote:

>Actually, the reverse is true.  The speech act pronouns (1st and 2nd) in
>Dyirbal follow a nom/acc paradigm while 3rd person pronouns and nouns follow
>an erg/abs one.  This is driven by animacy considerations.
D'oh! Alright, I'm lucky I didn't write a huge grammar
already. :) Thanks for telling. I gathered it had to
do with animacy, and also with the fundamental
difference between third persons, on one side, and
1st/2nd persons on the other (i. e. that the 3rd
person may not be a person, or even be totally
hypothetical or inexistent).

>No, passives are somewhat rare in ergative languages.  Actually, the
>morphological split noted above is orthogonal to the syntactic one in which
>antipassives are required to meet certain ergative pivot constraints on
>clause combination.  The former are driven by the animacy of the nominal
>while the latter are driven by its syntactic relation to the verb
>independent of case.

I think I got about 10% of that undoubtedly helpful explanation.
Enough to see the difference, I guess. What I was trying to figure
out was if passive could exist if you were using the nom/acc pattern;
but Nik has already told us that Dyirbal is purely ergative, except
for the morphology on the pronouns, so a feature of nom/acc langs,
like passive voice, is unlikely to appear.

>> In any case, is it likely that a system like this could
>> lose case endings, case being distinguished by word order
>> alone? In this scenario, I'm planning to keep the case
>
>Why would you believe that to be so?

I want to avoid heavy morphology. I imagine a language that
is drifting to a very analytic stage, keeping only some clitics
(which I could as well call prepositions) to mark roles. My idea
so far is to have VSO order, which means V-NOM-ACC or V-ERG-ABS
(syntactic, not semantic roles). I'd use nom/acc when the subject
is 1st or 2nd person (regardless of the animacy of the object),
and erg/abs otherwise. Accusatives will be morphologically marked
always. Ergatives will be marked in transitive sentences when the
object is animate (or should I keep the erg alone and use accusative
for the object? or both?).


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/draseleq.html