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've read of a language which I guess would fit in that catagory.
>There's no distinction on the noun, but there are 20 different genders,
>and the verb agrees with the subject and object in gender, so that the
>possibility of ambiguity is virtually nill.
The gender linkage makes sense for the one-case system, and I'm wondering
how my 2 gender one-case system (for expressed noun phrases) is going to
work out.

  There's also the system in
>Algonquian languages (I forget the term), where the noun ranking higher
>in animacy goes before the noun ranking lower in animacy.  If the noun
>ranking lower in animacy is the agent, then there is a special marking
>on the noun to indicate that.  (I may be mis-remembering some of the
>details).
This is a fine explanation, that meshes with what I've read. I've seen it
called an "inverse" system, I guess because the more animate is always the
agent unless the verb is marked for inversion.

>> Nor is it necessarily in other languages, but usually the distinction is
>> not marked in absolute terms, but in relative ones. So "the door knocked
>> over the candle" marks door as agent, and candle as patient, even if the
>> door was blown by the wind, because it's _more_ an agent than the candle is.
>
>Door may also be in the instrumental in many languages.
I have in mind a sentence like
The door knocked over the candle.

As I understand Sally's system this would have two forms, depending on the
speaker's belief about the volitionality of the door. Instrumental cases
are almost always indirect (omissible), and indirect cases vary much more.
This is with the exception of those languages that have true ditransitive
verbs (where instrumental is often a "core" argument). Or maybe you mean
that the door would be in the instrumental case even though it's a primary
argument of the verb? I believe that some languages do this, though I can't
remember any names.

I guess that Malagasy and such also blur the core/non-core argument
distinctionbecause they have 6 or 7 possible cases for the trigger argument
that can be marked on the verb.

It's the number of systems that don't _quite_ fit into a single
meta-framework that make me sure that there are potential language systems
that no-one knows yet.

  -- David
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Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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