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

>David G. Durand wrote:
> >>   A, S, P together: rare system, no case or dependable syntactic marking of
> >> argument roles. I've never seen examples of this, but it's claimed to
> >> exist, and depends heavily on context or paraphrase to distinguish agent
> >> and patient.
> >
I may be off the topic, but Ainu has some features that - I think - are of some
interest regarding that question. As you know perhaps Ainu - like old Japanese
- is SOV - and sometime OSV - with no core case-tags AND personal possessive
affixes are the same as the transitive subject marking affixes. That's what my
professors would call an 'attributive' case when the attribute is predicate.
However, it's not an holophrastic language. Had it be so classified I'm sure
some linguists would say that the transitive subject marking affixes are the
same as the ergative pronouns affixed to the predicate ;-) I'm (almost)
kidding.
The point is that there are no 'accusative' personal possessive affixes BUT when
you compare accusative affixes with transitive subject affixes, well, only the
1st person is different and the 1st person-affix is often omitted so most of
the time only position of words shows who's the 'subject' except when the
position is OSV :-) (I can't help smiling while writing this). And
'applicative' is heavily used to 'di-transitivize' (sorry) verbs and make
substantives :-)

[snipped but saved]

Mathias

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