Re: Betreft: VOS
| From: | Matt Pearson <jmpearson@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 26, 2000, 16:23 |
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>I don't know if VOS automatically means that it is ergative.
>Yucatec Maya is split ergative. It is nominative in imperfect and
>ergative in perfect (or the other way round, I start to doubt now) aspect.
Where does your information on Yucatec Mayan come from?
I'm very interested in split-ergative languages where the split
follows aspect lines. Do you have a reference?
As for what the correlation is: If Yucatec Mayan is like other
split-ergative languages, it should be nominative in the imperfect
and ergative in the perfect. I would be *very* surprised and
interested if the split went the other way (I'm toying with a
theory which predicts that the split has to go this way).
Matt.