Re: THEORY: unergative

John wrote:

<< Philippe Caquant wrote:

> 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 !
<<snip excellent explanation>>

I would add to this that I've seen a historical explanation for the
split-ergativity in Hindi (based on tense: Nom/Acc in the present, Erg/Abs in the
past).   [Well, I think it was Hindi...   It might actually have been an older
language.]   Basically, in the past tense, the absolutive argument corresponds to
the nominative case in the present (unmarked), and the ergative arguments
corresponds to the oblique case.   The reason for this is that the passive came to
be used much more commonly in the past tense, so rather than saying, "I built
the temple", they'd say "the temple was built by me".   This form became so
fossilized that it became an ergative/absolutive system, but only in the past
tense (in otherwords, they wouldn't say, "The temple is being built by me" in
response to "What are you doing?").

-David