Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

I have found an argument along the lines you referred to. :) Basically
the argument focuses on a group of verbs including deitu, which I gave
as an example, which are semantically intransitive, but take an erg
argument. The problem with this is (possibly) that Basque marks them
morphologically as transitives, and there aren't that many of them (the
vast vast majority of verbs are morphologically and semantically the
same transitivity wise, and all morphologically intransitive verbs take
an abs argument). Many languages have a few verbs which are treated
differently from their semantic transitivity. I'm not convinced that
these few verbs constitute a true trend towards split-S, but are
probably rather just a (very) few verbs which have drifted in meaning
but kept their old transitive agreement. As I said, if "ari", to act,
takes an absolutive argument, then Basque isn't really very split S is it?