Re: erg/abs; verbs.

At 04:24 PM 3/13/2000 +0100, daniel andreasson wrote:
>I wonder which is most common. To actually have cases, or just agreement
>on the verbs. Johanna Nichols has a summary of active languages and
>all of them mark it on the verb, but none on the NPs. The lgs that
>she calls Dominant Ergative seem to mark the ergativity mostly on
>both pronouns and NPs and many times on the verb as well. I wonder
>why active lgs so rarely use case, but ergative use it all the time?
>
>Daniel
>
Could you give a citation for the Johanna Nichols summary?  It sounds
interesting.  I don't know much about active languages, but I'd like to
know more.

Not too long ago, I read Winfred P. Lehmann's recent book on Indo-European
(I can't find it right now, so I can't give you a citation), and he argued
that at some stage in its history, Proto-IE was an active language and
_did_ mark case on nouns (-s for agent and -m for patient).

- Tim