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Re: Pronouns in Split Ergative systems

From:Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 14, 2004, 0:13
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:52:28 +0100, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

> Describing Morphosyntax says that ergative marking in split ergative > systems is always applied to less animate entities, whereas more animate > entities take accusative marking.
Yeah. That's one kind of split ergative marking. [snip]
> Are there any natural languages with > a split ergative system divided like this where the split also occurs in > the pronoun system, with pronouns referring to humans taking accusative > marking, and pronouns referring to non humans taking ergative marking?
Funnily enough, I was just reading Dixon on that very subject (ergativity split by sematics of NPs) earlier today. There's a hell of a lot to excerpt, but the short answer is yes, the split can occur anywhere in the heirarchy: (Most likely to be Nom/Acc) 1st person pronouns 2nd person pronouns 3rd person pronouns Demonstratives Proper nouns Human Animate Inanimate (Most likely to be Erg/Abs) Note that Accusativity and Ergativity can spread each from their opposite ends of the spectrum by differing amounts. You might have a system where there are a middle few of the above that take *no* Accusative or Ergative marking (i.e. you must use word order or some other feature to disambiguate), or where a middle few might have a full tripartite system, marking S, A and P each with their own marker. Some examples... Dyirbal: 1st & 2nd | 3rd A -0 | -Ngu S -0 | -0 O -na | -0 ACC | ERG Cashinawa: 1st & 2nd | 3rd pronoun | 3rd noun A -0 | habu~ | (nasalisation) S -0 | habu | -0 O -a | haa | -0 ACC | TRIPART | ERG In Yidiny, the patterning is 1st and 2nd pronouns - Accusative Human deictics and interrogative pronoun - Tripartite Inanimate deictics, proper names, kin terms - Tripartite with optional drop of O marking Inanimate interrogative, common nouns and adjectives - Ergative In Nabe"b, it's 1st person - Tripartite 2nd, 3rd - Ergative There are exceptions to this universal, but they're few in number. Occasionally personal names rank above (more accusative than) demonstratives and there are a few languages where 2nd is above 1st. In addition to these and other Noun-based splits, Dixon covers a lot of detail on Verb-based splits, both syntactically- and semantically-controlled (which he labels split-S and fluid-S resepectively). I can try to summarise those sections if you're interested. Note that it's possible to have verbs split in one way and nouns split in another way within the same language. Paul