Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Hallo!

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 20:01:09 +0200,
Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:

> 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.
Ah, Klimov's contentive typology!  This strikes me as quackish and
crypto-Marrist (yet some western linguists, e.g. Winfred P. Lehmann,
believe in that hogwash).  Klimov made some bold claims about
typological implications of the various language types that are
poorly supported by facts, and upheld a stadial theory according
to which languages evolve from class languages (like the Bantu
languages) via active-stative (i.e., split-S) and then ergative
into accusative languages.  If you ask me, it's all rubbish.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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