Re: Ergative
| From: | Matt Pearson <mpearson@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, October 22, 1998, 4:58 |
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Skrintha wrote:
>> I'm interested to see that Tamil has the experiencer dative construction
>> alongside Hindi. Does Tamil also have split-ergativity? (I seem to
>> remember that the Dravidian languages are nominative/accusative, but
>> I may be mistaken...)
>
>Since the verbs for which the experiencer dative is available in each lang
>appear to coincide (eg., know/need/like), I suppose that one of the langs
>(or their parent-langs) might have borrowed it from the other.
Possibly, but not necessarily. As I said in my earlier post, the experiencer
dative construction is found all over the world in various unrelated - or
distantly related - languages, e.g. Icelandic, Hindi, Korean, Georgian.
This suggests that this construction is a reflex of the interaction of
'deep' grammatical principles.
Matt.
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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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