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

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > Yeah, this definitely looks like an active system.  Here's a question,
> > for "he fell", if he didn't fall on purpose, but he could have prevented
> > it (i.e., it was due to his own carelessness), would it still be
> > patient, or would it be agent?
>
>         If he fell on accident, whther he caught himself or not, its
> aways in the experiencer case.
>
>         Clinton
>
'experience' is the state were you are at a certain stage of a process. It's like you step
outside time. You don't refer to the different stages of process in time
(aspective vision), but to the state in comparison to other states (unaspective
vision). People in active systems find it difficult to stop referring to
process in a phrase. So they go way round and think : what does embody a state
outside time ? A 'noun'. So they use the noun as an adjective (as Latins did :
'bonus' = 'the good one' > 'good' as an adjective) or as part of a compound
locution with a verb of state : 'to be good'.
The 'dative-experiencer' case discussed a few posts earlier is a way to make one
agent refer to state ('experience') while the predicate still refers to
process. But it's very difficult for people speaking nom/acc or split ergative
systems to figure that out.
Pure ergative and age/pat systems have no trouble referring to 'experience' because
absolutive case precisely originately refers to states like 'to-be-cut', and so
do either agent or patient depending on the predicate they refer to.

Mathias


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