Re: Antipassive

> From: Eric Christopherson
>
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 05:56:31PM +0100, O'Connell James wrote:
> > Its only a niggle, but 'exist in languages with
> > ergativity' should read 'exist in languages with
> > syntactic ergativity' in my opinion. For Example,
> > Elenyo is morphologically ergative, yet has no
> > antipassive, mainly because co-referentiallity is
> > actually displayed by an affix system removing the
> > need for a pivot relationship etc.
> >
> > James
>
> Hey, what is the distinction between syntactic and morphological
> ergativity?
> I can never keep concepts like syntax straight in my head.
Morphological ergativity deals with the discriminatory application of case
roles to the core arguments of a predicate within a simple clause. Syntactic
ergativity deals with ergatively motivated syntactic constraints on clause
combination and on the omission of coreferential constituents in clause
combinations. See my page on Ergativity in amman iar at
http://www.graywizard.net/Conlinguistics/ergativity.htm for more details or
better yet, read Dixon's book 'Ergativity'.

Stay curious,
David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
www.graywizard.net

Wisdom begins in wonder.