Re: nom/accu pronouns erg/abs everything else

On 14/05/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On 5/14/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> > Yup.   There are five possible ways of dividing (Subject, Agent,
> > Patient) into subsets:
>
> Note that these five categories are not sufficient to categorize all
> entire languages.  For example, the so-called "Split S" languages
> appear to be accusative in some utterances and ergative in others,
> depending on additional criteria not captured in the S vs A vs P
> distinction.
>
Yep. For our purposes, they should probably be lumped in with fluid-S;
the distinction between the two being, that in split-S, a verb is
lexically either accusative or ergative (like imperfective and
perfective verbs in Russian), whereas in fluid-S, the same lexical
verb is accusative or ergative by context. An example from an
otherwise un-ergative language would be Spanish, where "caigo" means
"I jump", but "me caigo" (morphologically reflexive) means "I fall".

Jeff

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