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Re: THEORY: unergative

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 25, 2004, 21:26
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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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>