Re: Ergativity Question

From:    Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...>
> Perhaps my problem is that I never thought of passivization as being
> detransitivizing, but as reversing the roles or the word order. Let me
> demonstrate the concept I'm trying to describe. Let's start with some
> English sentences:
>
> 1) I ate.                (active, intransitive)
> 2) I ate corn.           (active, transitive)
> 3) Corn was eaten.       (passive, intransitive)
> 4) Corn was eaten by me. (passive, "transitive")
>
> Granted, 4) is a bit akward in English, and requires the use of a
> prepositional phrase, but its essentially the same as 2) but with a reversal
> of word order and voice.
That's actually not true.  In a truly transitive sentence, both
arguments *must* be present.  In this case, the passive in English
allows an *optional* agent in an oblique phrase.

[...]
> In a nominative/accusative, I would mark it like this (using OBJ for the
> object of the preposition)
>
> 1) I(NOM) ate(AV).
> 2) I(NOM) ate(AV) corn(ACC).
> 3) Corn(NOM) was eaten(PV).
> 4) Corn(NOM) was eaten(PV) by me(OBJ).
>
> In ergative languages, for the last two we have:
> 3) Corn(ABS) was-eaten(PV).
> 4) Corn(ABS) was-eaten(PV) me(ERG).
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 believe I've also read about something called antipassive,
> where 1) becomes:
> 1) I(ABS) ate(APV).
This is not a good example to use in English, since "eat" is a
labile verb (neither strictly transitive, nor intransitive).  In
a true antipassive, there is usually some morphological indication
that the patient has been demoted and the verb is detransitivezed.
In an ergative language, this is mostly clearly indicated by the
case of the agent becoming absolutive:

A.  I-erg kicked the ball-abs.
B.  I-abs kicked-at[ANTIPASS] (the ball-OBL)

> But then we don't have any way to say 2) in the antipassive voice
> (AFAIK) 2*) I(ABS) ate(APV) corn(NOT-ERG!!!)
>
> I guess this would be akin to the akwardness of case 4) in nom/acc
> langs. So perhaps I could make a preposition that marks the patient,
> and do something like this:
> 2) I(ABS) ate(APV) of corn(OBJ)
> Come to think of it, I kinda like that. :-)
In most antipassive constructions I've seen, the patient can be
demoted into an *optional* oblique case (just as the agent in a
passive can be demoted to an optional oblique case/phrase).  So,
what you propose here is already a well-known feature of antipassive
systems.  But that still doesn't suggest that the language is
ergative.

> But the system I was originally proposing would merge NOM and ABS into a
> single case -- for argument's sake lets call it SUB (for subject). Then we
> would have:
>
> 1) I(SUB) ate(AV).
> 2) I(SUB) ate(AV) corn(ACC).
> 3) Corn(SUB) was(PV) eaten.
> 4) Corn(SUB) was(PV) eaten me(ERG).
Actually, this is still not an ergative system. What you describe
here is simply a special instrumental case.  Many, many nom/acc
languages have something like this.  Russian, e.g.

> In this case we would have an "active" or "antipassive" voice in 1) and 2),
Active voice and antipassive voice are not at all the same.  Antipassive
and passive voice forms of verbs (or probably more accurately: related
verbs found in the lexicon) are *detransitivized* forms of active transitive
verbs.  The only difference between them is which argument gets demoted --
that associated with the agent-role, or that with the patient-role.

> which would use the "accusative" case to mark the second argument (patient).
> But in 3) and 4), we have a "passive" voice whcih uses the "ergative" to
> mark the second argument (agent).
You're still not getting at the question of how transitivity is
encoded in your language.  That's absolutely crucial:

> It just occured to me that this is similar
> to (my understanding of) languages like Tagalog, where any role can become
> the subject, and the verb changes form to denote the subjects role. In this
> case, Active Voice means "subject is agent" and Passive Voice means "subject
> is patient". But that's a whole 'nother kettle of corn. :-)
I would say that's a vast oversimplification of the Tagalog facts,
based on what I've read and heard.  Topicality and focus are central
to Tagalog grammatical relations encoding.  Off the top of my head,
one place to look for that is Christopher Manning's recent book
_Ergativity_ where he addresses where Tagalog fits in.

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