Re: a few questions

Tristan wrote:
>
>Just a few questions...
>
>1. (This question may have been answered already. If so, apologies. A
>few of the digests came through unreadable) A while ago, J Pearson
>answered a question about unergative sentences. I was wondering what the
>difference between this and intransitive sentences was.
Unergative sentences are a sub-set of intransitive sentences, namely those
were the subject "does" something rather than have something "done" to it .

"John ate" is unergative,
"The ship sank" is unaccusative (someone/-thing _sank_ the ship)
[snip]
>3. What does ergative mean?
A case that occures in so-called ergative langs. It's used for the subject
of transitive sentences, but not for the subjects of intransitive sentences,
which are in the same case (absolutive) as the direct objects of transitive
sentences.
>
>4. What is the difference between a creole and a language?
None! Actually, a creole is a language that's evolved from a pidginized
version of another language. For example, in the Caribean there's several
creoles that've evolved from pidginized English. They share many lexical
items with English, but have different syntax, phonology etc.

Creoles often have a very low social status, but unlike pidgins they're not
"inferior" languages in any objective sense.

                                                       Andreas
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