Re: Pronouns in Split Ergative systems
| From: | Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 14, 2004, 8:01 |
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>
> Anyway, what kind of system were you picturing?
>
I tried to describe it, but obviously my description wasn't very good.
:) I know some languages have split ergativity based on languages, the
heirarchy being something like this:
1<2<3 (verb marking) < 1 < 2 < 3 (pronoun system) < Proper nouns <
people < animals < plants < inanimates etc....
Wherever the split occurs, what's left of the split tends to be
accusative, and what's to the right tends to be ergatively marked. My
question was, suppose I place the split so that nouns referring to
people take accusative marking and nouns referring to non-people take
ergative marking. Are there any natural languages with a split like this
that also exhibit the same animacy split in the pronoun system? The
hierarchy (from Describing Morphosyntax) would seem to suggest that in
such cases the pronoun system would be completely accusative, but I
don't know if this is an absolute universal or one of those 99% of
languages.... type universals.
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