Re: Fluid-S pivot in Old Albic

Joerg wrote:
> > 1.) Are you aware of any natlangs that have any parts of Old Albic's
> > system?
>
> Of the languages I know of, Georgian seems to come closest to it
> (I even seem to remember reading about a fluid-S pivot in Georgian,
> but I am not sure)
It's a little more complicated than that in Georgian.  In the present
and aorist series, there is a standard accusative pivot:  intransitives
always obligatorily corefer with the agent of a transitive clause.
The trick is in the perfect series, where indeed there seems to be
a fluid-S pivot. What's more, it seems to be sensitive to discourse
structure, since when you focus the object to OSV order, suddenly
only an accusative pivot (which is weird, since if it were just
pragmatically determined you'd expect that focusing the object would
force a Split-S rather than Fluid-S pivot).  So, I would say that
the Georgian facts are not so close.  I seem to vaguely remember that
Acehnese has some odd pivot facts like this; check out Yehuda Falk's
_Explaining Subjecthood_ (which is available for free in PDF format
on his website).

As far as I know, no one but me has done research on Georgian pivots,
so I'm your likely source on that factoid.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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