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Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Thursday, January 20, 2005, 0:53
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.

Reply

Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>