Re: Conlang-to-body-shape connections

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:08:32AM +0100, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
[snip]

Ah, I seem to remember seeing this discussion way back when. At least
based on the word order, an equivalent sentence in Ebisedian might be
construed to be syntactically ergative:
        chi'd0  Kuu'jure l3       biz3tau'   ataro ray's.
        he(org) kick(v)  who(cvy) woman(rcp) away  run(v)
        "He kicked the woman, who ran away."

The translation isn't precise here, because "ran away" is not in a
subordinate clause. As for the exposition of the grammatical structure of
this sentence, I leave it up to whoever thirsts for a challenge to
decipher the Ebisedian reference grammar. :-)


T

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