Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism
| From: | Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, January 24, 2005, 10:15 |
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Hamjambo,
Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 20:01:09 +0200,
> Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:
> > 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! ... If you ask me, it's all rubbish.
That is why I keep on asking forgiveness of my ignorance in typology
studies, even though I'm a professional philologist. For example, I heard
about split-S etc. only here at this List. Our linguistic education was
still profiled by Stalin's "Marxism and Linguistic Issues". Surely, since
1970s there were some changes, but typology studies were still smth
suspective, bourgeois... That is why Klimov seemed revolutionary. I suspect
Dr. Tyshchenko's lectures on typology at General Linguistics classes in Kiev
Uni in 1989 that I heard, were quite in line with Klimov's stadial theory.
I don't want to offend anybody, but some "Western" ideas in linguistics
still strike me as odd, if not rubbish... Not in this case, of course.
-- Igor (Isaac) A. Penzev,
student of Kiev State University, Foreign Philology Dept. in 1989-1994
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