Re: Ergativity Question

Tim May wrote at 2004-08-17 16:10:39 (+0100)
 > Are you sure there's an established usage of "labile verb" to cover
 > _all_ verbs that can be transitive or intransitive?  Maybe someone
 > could look it up in Trask?

Oh... OK, scratch that, I found the following passage online*:

 | Although labile verbs have been an object of linguistic analysis
 | for long time, different meanings of this term have been
 | proposed. The most popular example of lability are labile verbs in
 | Daghestanian languages, that can be used intransitively (for
 | situations with one argument like "to die", as well as transitively
 | (in this case they mean causation of one argument situation, like
 | "to kill").  At the same time, in the grammars of some languages
 | the term "lability" is used in a broader sense.  The authors call
 | "labile verbs" all verbs, that can become either transitive or
 | intransitive, like English knit
 |
 | (Mary knits a sweater/Mary knits very well), even if the transitive
 | meaning is not causative meaning.  Finally, the third meaning of
 | the term "lability" is the most general: in the typological work
 | [Kopchevskaya 1986: 44] the author calls this name "ability for
 | using in several constructions of the sentence without special
 | marking of diathesis change in the verb", without specification of
 | the correlation between these constructions.

Still, it's an interesting point, and I'd still be interested in any
thoughts on the best choice of terminology here.

* http://www.kcn.ru/tat_ru/universitet/conf/LENCA-2/187.pdf