Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism
| From: | Tim May <butsuri@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, January 20, 2005, 0:53 |
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Isaac Penzev wrote at 2005-01-18 23:37:53 (+0200)
> Hi,
>
> Studying materials about ergativity for my new project, I found an
> interesting tendency. If the lang has ergativity, it usually has a
> polypersonal verb, that is a verb form explicitly denotes person
> and number of both subject and object. I found this in Basque,
> Georgian, Koryak and Chukchi. Is it as much universal, or you can
> show me examples of natlangs that have ergativity without a
> polypersonal verb?
>
The following languages are ergative in terms of case-marking and/or
verbal agreement at least some of the time, and so far as I can tell
from looking at various glossed examples, do not have polypersonal
verbs.
Hindi (and other Indo-Iranian)
Dyirbal
Tsimshianic languages e.g. Nisgha [1]
[1] Although these could probably be considered borderline
polypersonal. Ergative pronouns seem to be mandatory even when
there's a full ergative nominal. They're not actually part of the
verb, though.
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