Re: Ergativity Question

I actually mispasted the text, and didn't finish responding to
this part of Caleb's post:

Caleb wrote:
> > Well, maybe. What morphological case the agent gets put in does not
> > necessarily indicate that the agent has typical subject properties.
> > That's the crux of the issue.
>
> I'm not quite sure what you mean. Could you clarify or give an example?
Well, for example, in some ergative languages the instrumental-themed
argument and the agent-themed argument both receive ergative case,
as in "John-ERG hit the target-ABS (with) an arrow-ERG", even though
the second instance of morphological ergative case here is clearly not
the subject of the sentence.  Lak, a Daghestanian language, treats
both possessors and agents of transitive verbs with the same case
(usually called "genitive").

Again, in so-called "deep ergative" languages, those with ergative
syntax like Dyirbal, the absolutive marked argument is the one that
controls pivot relations, binding, etc, not the ergative argument.
Thus, even though the agent is overtly marked as such, it is not
the subject.  Georgian is a wonderful example of how case morphology
can be misalligned with thematic marking:  the agent can be in the
nominative, ergative, or dative cases depending on verb class and
tense.  (It's not clear that Georgian even has a subject, though.)

BTW, I spoke to a colleague of mine who studies Tagalog and other
Philippine languages about the issue of ergativity in Tagalog, and
he said more or less definitively that it isn't ergative, but that
it's not clear what exactly it is. Since it's not clear it even
has a subject, it's impossible to prove it's ergative.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637