Re: Ass metonymy (WAS: a bad essay)

More to the point, no language is "exclusively" accusative vs
ergative.  All languages have some traces of whichever pattern is not
dominant.

In any case, it seems clear that "they ass" as the subject of a
sentence does, in fact, occur in AAVE.  While it may at one time have
been limited to object use, that seems no longer to be true. Although
I suppose all of the instances that turn up on Google could
potentially be bad jobs by a non-native writing AAVE dialogue - a
problem when trying to search a corpus of a language that is almost
exclusively spoken, not written.



On 2/7/09, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> 2009/2/7 Sai Emrys <saizai@...>:
>> On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 2:19 AM, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>> wrote:
>>> "the book sold well"
>>
>> Isn't this called 'middle voice'?
>
> Good question. Feels like a bit of both to me -- an ergative sentence
> with unexpressed actor, or a "does something for itself".
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>
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Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>