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Re: Conlang-to-body-shape connections

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 26, 2003, 12:27
En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

> > Oro Mpaa is SVO too. I would have liked to try out a new > word order, but SVO is pretty much the only structure that > works well with my analytical serial verb syntax. Oro > Mpaa has no cases, so I guess it doesn't fit the bill of > the accusative/ergative/active/whatever categories. >
Cases are not necessary to categorise a language as accusative/ergative/active/whatever. English for instance has no cases, and yet is definitely and easily categorised as accusative. Same with French or Spanish. Accusativity/ergativity is not only a matter of case choice. There is also what is called "syntactic ergativity" (where is David Bell when we need him?! He's the syntactic ergativity guru of this list! :) ). An example is the sentence "he kicked the woman and ran away". In English, it means obviously that a man kicked a woman, and then ran away. The unexpressed subject of the intransitive verb is taken to be the subject of the transitive verb. The language is thus syntactically accusative, since it maps subjects of intransitive verbs with *subjects* of intransitive verbs. But there are languages where this same sentence (once translated :)) ) would mean: he kicked the woman, and *the woman* ran away. In that case, the unexpressed subject of the intransitive verb is taken to be the *object* of the transitive verb (David Bell's Amman-Iar does exactly that). So in those languages, the subject of an intransitive verb is mapped with the *object* of a transitive verb, i.e. the language is syntactically ergative, and you needn't have any case-marking for it to be so. So how does Oro Mpaa behave in that respect? Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

Replies

H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>Acc/Erg/Etc sans Cases