Re: THEORY: unergative

Hallo!

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 13:44:38 -0600,
Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:


> 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.
My conlang Old Albic, at least as far as I know yet, appears to be
consistently active (and it is a human language).  But I haven't
explored all the details of its morphology and syntax yet.

>       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.
Which, AFAIK, violates a universal that states that if there is
a split on the referential hierarchy, it's the other way round,
as in Dyirbal.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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