Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

From:Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>
Date:Sunday, January 23, 2005, 18:02
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