Re: THEORY: unergative

In a message dated 2/22/2004 10:48:21 AM Eastern Standard Time,
joe@WANTAGE.COM writes (responding to me):

>>I think it's potentially misleading to use the term "conception" here.
There
>>is no reason to believe that Basque speakers "conceive" of the proposition
"I
>>shot the sherriff" any differently than English speakers do.  Their grammar
>>just marks things differently.
>>
>>
>>
>
>Well, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct, they do concieve it
>differently.  Not that I'm saying it is.  But it's a possibility.
A possibility, I suppose, but I wouldn't believe it without some evidence.
In his book _Ergativity_, RMW Dixon writes, "Consider the seven languages
belonging to the Ngayarda subgroup in Western Australia . . . three of them retain
ergative case marking while the other four have adopted an accusative system.
Have the accusative language-speakers experienced an increase in mental
status, or acquired a different world-view?  Not at all.  I have spent nearly
thirty years working fairly steadily with speakers of Dyirbal and other ergative
languages; we do have differences in world-view, but none of these can be
attributed to the accusativity/ergativity of our languages.  The ergative or
accusative profile of a language is simply a choice between typological alternatives,
just like the choice of which constituent order (AVO, AOV, VOA, etc.) to
employ.  Neither of these types of choice correlates in any way with economic
basis or cultural organization of a community, or with the way in which the
speakers of a language view the world and their place in it."