Re: THEORY: unergative

Philippe Caquant wrote:

> I guess the first thing is to really understand the
> ergative way of expressing, then we'll see for the
> unergative and the rest of it. However, I already
> noticed that some languages are half-accusative,
> half-ergative, like Georgian, where the same sentence
> will be expressed a different way, depending if it is
> in present or in past tense. This I find absolutely
> confounding. I have to find out why it is so !
There really aren't any languages that are consistently 100% ergative;
they all have some remnants of nominative/accusative elements in their
morphology or syntax. I should say there aren't any _human_ languages
that are 100% ergative; there are plenty of _Zireen_ languages that are
consistently ergative. But in Dyirbal for instance, which is one of the
standard examples of an ergative language, first and second person
pronouns are nominative/accusative. In my own language Kazvarad, which
was originally a human language (and is currently in an undefined state,
depending on whether there turn out to be humans in the Azirian
universe), the pronoun prefixes on verbs are nominative/accusative,
while nouns have ergative/absolutive morphology.