Re: nom/accu pronouns erg/abs everything else

On 14/05/07, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On 5/14/07, T. A. McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
> > Jeff Rollin wrote:
> > > I'm not sure what "mrl" refers to but tripartite languages are (a) a
> > > minority among world languages and (b) predominant in my language
> > > sketches!
> >
> > Monster Raving Loony probably --- obviously not a formal term.
>
> Yup.   There are five possible ways of dividing (Subject, Agent,
> Patient) into subsets:
>
> S A P
> 1 1 1
> 1 1 2        Accusative
> 1 2 1        Ergative
> 1 2 2        Monster Raving Loony
> 1 2 3        Tripartite
>
> I don't know what we call the case where there's no morphosyntactic
> distinction at all among the three roles.
Impossible? ;-)

Interestingly, (according to Wikipedia, anyway), Milewski's typology
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milewski%27s_typology) does not seem to
take into account languages where experiencers, agents, patents and
(nominal) attributes all exhibit different characteristics - but
surely there must be some examples of languages which do?


Jeff

PS Apparently Yagua has no distinction between IO and DO :-/

>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
>

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