Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Well, a few decades ago, it was common to call all sorts of foreign
> looking systems of grammatical relations 'ergative', basically
> on the grounds that all languages had either a nom/acc or an erg/abs
> alignment.  We now recognize that the situation is considerably more
> complicated than that, so we call them by different names.
>
> I was just looking at one site right now, and it repeated this
> error.  So it seems to still be floating around.
I see. Maybe I was a bit under the pressure of Soviet linguistic school that
divided languages into nominative, ergative and active according to scheme
proposed by G.Klimov (so called "contensive typology") in 1983. I don't know
the latest tendencies, but typological studies were not welcomed under the
Soviet regime.

-- Yitzik