Re: Ergative and other questions

If I understand Carsten correctly, he's run across "transitive"
and "intransitive" as case names.

They are indeed so used, to describe the very small number of languages
wherein the subject and object of a transitive verb are in one case, and the
subject of an intransitive verb in another. If this system makes absolutely no
sense whatsoever to you, don't worry; this system is sometimes known
as "Monster Raving Loony". Nonetheless, it's found in some Iranian languages.

A large majority of all languages are either accusative or ergative. Beyond
transitive/intransitive, other options are "active", which means that some
intransitive subjects go in the same case as transitive objects and others in
the same as transitive subjects, and "tripartite", which means that
intransitive subjects, transitive subjects and transitive objects all have
their own case.

                                                   Andreas

> 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
>