Re: "He opened the door and he (same referent) left the room"

Christophe wrote:

>Basque is grammatically as ergative as one can
imagine. However, syntactically it's strongly accusative (so that the
sentence "he opened the door and left the room" means exactly the same
thing in English and in Basque, despite the fact that English is
grammatically accusative and Basque grammatically ergative).

I'm not at all sure about this, but IIRC:
The proposed Basque sentence (which could indeed be translated into the
Engl. version) would still contain markings that "open" is transitive and
"leave/depart" is intrans. (because the two types of verbs use different
conjugated auxiliaries, which indicate the subject (and object if present).
Schemtically something like:

door-abs.  open(participle)  "HAVE"-3subj.-3obj and
room-from/ablative?  depart(ptc.)  "BE"-3subj.

Then the question might be whether BE-3subj is ambiguous for He1 or He2.  I
don't know. All things being equal, I suspect speakers assume identical
subjects in these cases. Context, context.

Or maybe Basque would rephrase ~ "door opening, he left the room".

Indonesian could resolve ambiguity by using ia 'he/she' for one, ia itu(?)
'he that' for the other.  Otherwise it's as unclear as English, or worse,
especially if, as is common in speech, _all_ pronouns are omitted.

Ia membuka pintu dan keluarlah (dari kamar)-- clearly both He1 I think.
Ia membuka pintu dan ia itu keluarlah... -- He1 - He2
Membuka pintu (dan) keluarlah... -- Any subject at all in context!!

Marking switch-ref. inflectionally seems to be uncommon IMO, but clearly
useful.