Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Maxime:

We are all, and that certainly includes Christophe, well aware of the
traditional explanation of French grammar.  And that traditional
explanation is of course correct in that it describes how French
developed.

His point is that if you didn't know anything about its history came
upon modern French as a spoken language with no writing system, there is
absolutely nothing in the language that would lead you in the direction
of the traditional analysis.  I'm not sure it would even be identified
as a Romance language.  Almost certainly not at first.

The implication of this discrepancy is that the traditional analysis,
despite its correctness and utility from a historic standpoint, is
not necessarily useful in analyzing the modern language from a
linguistic standpoint.

-Marcos