Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Yitzik wrote:
> 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?
Well, for starters, Georgian isn't an ergative language -- it's
split-S in its nominal morphology, and mostly nom/acc in its syntax.  The
confusion arises in part because the case of the agent argument in the
aorist series is usually called in the non-Kartvelophone literature
'ergative'; Georgians themselves call it _mot'q'robiti_ 'narrative' case.

Secondly, Johanna Nichols in her book _Linguistic Diversity through
Space and Time_ says that in fact quite the opposite tends to be the
case:  languages said to have an ergative alignment favor dependent
marking, and thus tend *not* to mark both arguments on the verb.  Of the
28 ergative languages in her sample, 16 were dependent marking, and
only four were strongly head-marking (including Abkhaz, Wishram and
Tzutujil).

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