Re: Ergative and other questions

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 05:23:15PM +0100, Carsten Becker wrote:
> As newbie, I absolutely do not know what they mean. As for the cases, I
> already looked on that SIL linguistic terms lexicon page, but there they
> spoke about "transtive" and "intransitive" verbs. I heard about these, but I
> never really understood what they mean.
Well, let's start there.  Transitive verbs have an "object"; that is,
whenever they occur in a sentence, that sentence also includes a word or
phrase which tells you what the verb is happening *to*.  For instance,
in the sentence "I won the race!", the object of the verb "won" is "the
race".  (What did I win?  I won the race.)  So in this sentence, the verb
"won" (which is the past tense form of the verb "to win") is transitive.

However, in English you can also say simply "I won!".  There is no
object in the sentence, so the verb is now intransitive.  It has no
object.

There are many examples of verbs in English that can be either transitive
or intransitive; perhaps most transitive verbs in English can also be used
intransitively.  But there are also verbs that can only be one or the
other.  And in some other languages, *every* verb can only be one or the other,
but not both; often there is a specific grammatical rule for transforming
a transitive verb into an intransitive, or vice-versa.

There is a third category of verb, called "reflexive", which just means
that the verb has an object, but the object is the same as the subject.
English doesn't really distinguish these from the transitive case -
we just use a reflexive pronoun such as "myself" ("I can barely hear
myself think!") as the object.

The terms "absolutive" and "ergative" refer to noun cases - forms
of nouns which indicate how the noun is being used in a sentence
- which don't occur in English.  Many languages have noun cases,
but they don't all have the same ones.  There are basically two
types, called "nominative/accusative" ("accusative" for short)
and "absolutive/ergative" ("ergative").  English, German, Russian,
Latin (and the Romance languages) are all nominative/accusative:
they have one form (the nominative) for the subject of a verb,
and a different form (the accusative) for its object (often along
with many other cases for other roles, but those don't matter for
this distinction).  In English nouns don't have cases any more,
but pronouns still do.  For instance, in the first person singular,
the nominative pronoun is "I" while the accusative pronoun is "me".

The important thing about nominative/accusative languages is that the
subject of a verb always goes into the nominative case, *whether the
verb is transitive or intransitive* (or reflexive, for that matter).
In my earlier examples, the subject has to be "I" (not "me") in both
"I won the race" and "I won".  (If English still had noun case,
the word "race" would be in the accusative case.)

In absolutive/ergative languages, things are carved up differently.
The subject and object of the sentence "I won the race" are still
in different cases, but the *subject* of the sentence "I won" is in the
same case as the *object* of the sentence "I won the race".
This case is called the the "absolutive", and it is used for the
*object* of *transitive* verbs and the *subject* of *intransitive* or
*reflexive* verbs.  The other case,  used only for the subject of
transitive verbs, is called the "ergative".

-Mark

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