> From: J. Barefoot
> >
> >Could you clarify the case system? Is it a mixed
> >ergative/accusative system? How come you use the
> >relative case in your example sentence instead of
> >the nominative? Does it have something to do with
> >the verb 'to see', with the 'subject' being an
> >experiencer, or what?
> ani al puyan musinaan ni'i al tisuuyaa
> I.rel the woman-acc see.durative-past at the doorway-loc
> I used to see the woman in the doorway.
> Mixed ergative/accustive, and the ergative form happens to be the same as
> the genitive form. The subject of this sentence is in the relative case
> because it has a direct object. Something like "I see" (an intransitive)
> would just be "aminaani" with a personal prefix.
I don't think I follow this. Most mixed ergative/accusative systems
condition the split on semantic or grammatical grounds, but they generally
use erg/absol on one side of the split and nom/acc on the other. For
example, Dyirbal uses nom/acc for speech act pronouns and erg/absol for all
other nominals. Your example sentence doesn't seem to follow this kind of
split. One would have expected either:
pure accusative
I.nom the woman-acc...
or
pure ergative
I.erg the woman.absol...
mixed erg/acc
I.nom the woman.absol
or
I.erg the woman.acc
Could you explain the distribution of your nom, acc, rel and erg cases?
David