Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Isaac Penzev wrote at 2005-01-20 14:21:35 (+0200)
 > Hi,
 >
 > Tim May wrote:
 >
 > > The following languages are ergative in terms of case-marking
 > > and/or verbal agreement at least some of the time, and so far as
 > > I can tell from looking at various glossed examples, do not have
 > > polypersonal verbs.
 >
 > Thank you for the information. Therefore, I think both
 > possibilities are quite natural and plausible, and I may choose any
 > variant for the project just based on whether I like it or not.
 >
 > > Hindi (and other Indo-Iranian)
 > > Dyirbal
 >
 > I heard this to be an Australian lang. Is it the same as Jiwarli?
 > My dic gives no info about it.
 >



Yes, it's Australian.  Not the same as Jiwarli.  It's well known now
as an example of various kinds of ergativity[1], because RMW Dixon did
a study of it early in his career.  It shouldn't be too difficult to
get hold of further information if you're interested.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=DBL


 > > Tsimshianic languages e.g. Nisgha [1]
 >
 > Again, no info at all in my "Linguistic Encyclopaedical Dictionary", Moscow,
 > 1990 (further referred to as LED-90).
 >

An Amerindian family, in the NW coastal sprachbund.  I haven't been
able to find much beyond what's in Mithun's _The Languages of Native
North America_.  They seem to have some rather interesting features.
Case is marked by enclitics attaching to the previous word, for
example (although I'm not sure that these "connectives", as they're
called, play this role in all languages of the family).

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=2094

[1] A split between 1st and 2nd person pronouns (accusative) and other
    nominals (ergative), for example, and syntactic ergativity.  (In
    fact, I gather Dyirbal may be the _only_ known syntactically
    ergative language, by Dixon's definition.)

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