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Re: nom/accu pronouns erg/abs everything else

From:David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>
Date:Monday, May 14, 2007, 16:33
Paul wrote:

<<
 >>

Payne calls this an agent-worthiness hierarchy.  He calls it this
because it doesn't seem right, to him, to say it's all animacy (why
is a pronoun more animate than the word "man"?), rather it's
more that certain things seem to be more worthy of being an
agent than others, and if they're not, then they need to be marked
as such.

The table he has has two levels, and I can't reproduce it here
very well.  I tried to reproduce in example 40 here:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/notes/ergativity.php#4p4

This is from Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax_.

-David
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