Re: ergative? I don't know...

It does appear that Americans have a different point of view.
This may be the legacy of Chomsky and others who generalized
about all languages from a study of just one (well, some say
that; I was anti-Chomsky before it became fashionable ...)
Or maybe it is a legacy of French philosophical tradition
that they (or some of them) prefer the semantic approach.
If we are lucky, somebody with an orthogonal viewpoint
will contradict both of the others; the more the better.
Down with all linguistic theoretical universals!

[snippage below]

> At 8:02 AM -0400 10/26/98, Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
> >So this is only a
> >matter of semantics (yes, here I go again. ouch ! not on my glasses ! :-).
David G. Durand wrote:

> In the Anglo-American school of comparative linguistics that Nik and I are
> promulgating, there are 3 levels of description.
> The 3 levels are semantic roles, syntactic functions, and grammatical cases.
>
> Semantic roles are things like: Actor (sometimes "agent" in confusing and
> sloppy writers like myself), Destination, Instrument, Location, Patient,
> etc. These are defined by the semantics of an action (as interpreted by a
> human) and are invariant across processes like passivization, etc. They are
> the underlying reality being expressed by the language. I have very light
> presuppositions at this level, as I believe that the philosophical and
> empirical ground is still so unclear that even lengthy discussion will
> never converge on an answer. If this were a forum on linguistic philosophy,
> then I might get into it.
> I don't want to engage in a discussion of whether this is a "true" theory
> of meaning, or the extent to which language determines, or reflects
> fundamentally different conceptions of the world. I haven't seen any such
> discussions make progress, so I stay out. I will say that your accusation
> that this analysis is based on English is a bit bizarre.