Re: THEORY: unergative

I recently discovered, to my utter despair, that a
whole horde of linguistic concepts I hadn't reckoned
upon were howling under my city walls.

I had heard before of things like accusative, passive,
theme, rheme and even ergative and absolutive. Now
there seems that they brought new friends called
anti-accusative, anti-passive, primary theme,
secundary theme and anti-ergative (probably others
too). I feel the same as physicists when they
discovered that there were some anti-neutrons,
anti-protons, anti-electrons, plus some Higgs-bosons
and three dozens of even more suspicious characters
around.

So here I'm trying to summarize the little I (believe
I) know about that, in hope to see the Light some day.

1/ Languages like Latin or English use transitive
verbs (among others), like in:
I shot the sheriff
*I* is understood as agent, thus subject and in the
nominative case
*the sheriff* is understood as the patient, thus
object and in the accusative case (I shot him)
The passive form would be :
The sheriff was shot by me (*me* being facultative,
but if present, at an oblique case)

2/ But there are languages, like Basque, various
Caucasian langs and others, using another way :
By-me shot the sheriff
*me* being in ergative case, and *the sheriff* in
absolutive
What conception does such a form reflect ? I think I
understand it as : "There was some sheriff-shooting,
and that was done by me". Maybe I'm wrong ?

So what's exactly the theme and the rheme in those two
sentences, I'm not clear about it yet. Normally the
theme is "what we're talking about", and the rheme
"which new information we're adding to that topic".
Maybe I'm wrong too ? But if I burst into the saloon
and yell "I shot the sheriff !", looks to me that
there wasn't any theme and the whole sentence is the
rheme ? Or maybe theme and rheme don't apply in such
cases ? Gloomy darkness.

3/ When the verb is not a transitive one, than the two
different ways we just saw become something like :
I danced, or :
I shivered
(*I* being the grammatical subject, in the nominative;
in the first case, "I" is doing an on-purpose
activity, in the secund case, a not-on-purpose
activity (?) ; is "I" yet called an agent or not, I
dunno - probably an *experient* in the case of
shivering ?)
but the Basque or whatever would say :
By-me danced, or By-me shivered (meaning: There was
some dancing / shivering and it was done by me)

So the linguists said : well, in that case, this is
not ergative, this is anti-ergative, because ergative
can only apply in transitive sentences. (Is that it ?)

And then they said: well, if there is anti-ergative,
why shouldn't it be also anti-accusative, anti-passive
and anti-whatever-ive ? (The point is I can't find out
any examples by myself, my brain having got over the
boiling point already).

So if somebody could give me some clear and easy
examples, I would pray the Lord he be blessed, and his
sons be blessed, and his grandsons be blessed, and his
cats and dogs and cows and sheeps and everybody home
be blessed too.

--- "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:
> From:    Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > > Actually, you have it precisely backwards.
> 'Unaccusatives' are
> > > intransitives which, in most derivational
> theories of grammar,
> > > have underlying objects, but no subjects, like
> 'appear'.  In
> > > GB/PP/Minimalism that argument gets raised to
> get its case checked,
> > > and surfaces as the subject in spite of itself.
> They also have a
> > > number of properties of objects of transitive
> verbs.  Unergative
> > > verbs, in contrast, have underlying subjects but
> no object, and tend
> > > to behave like subjects of transitive clauses,
> like 'dance'.
> >
> > (Not the OP, but:) So if I have it right,
> accusative languages treat all
> > intransitive verbs as unergative and ergative
> languages treat all
> > intransitive verbs as unaccusative (grammatically,
> not semantically,
> > speaking)?
>
> No, the claim is that all/most languages have two
> classes of
> intransitive verbs, and that these classes may have
> a variety
> of realizations both syntactic and morphological.
> The terms
> 'unaccusative' and 'unergative' are really very
> misleading, and
> should be dropped, if it were possible to do so.
> (It's not.)

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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