Re: Ergativity Question

Thank-you for your detailed response! There's alot for me to think about
here. If you could just bear with me a little longer, though, I would
appreciate it.

> > 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.
I guess when I said "essentially the same" I meant semantically, not
grammatically. The bottom line is that both 2) and 4) mean that there is an
object called 'corn', an object called 'me' and and action called 'to eat'
which the 'me'-object applies to the 'corn'-object. This brings me to...

> You're still not getting at the question of how transitivity is
> encoded in your language.  That's absolutely crucial:
The short answer is: it isn't encoded -- at least not in the grammar.
Akathanu is very much an "engelang" (it was originally inspired in a
predicate logic class), and some of the design goals include a sort of
orthogonality and minimalism. One result of this is that transitivity is not
marked in the grammar. In a sense, every argument of a 'verb'* is an
optional argument -- no arguments are required. If the semantics of a word
require some argument for a it to make sense, and there isn't a
corresponding oblique word in the sentence, a default word ('something') is
understood.

*(Exactly what is a verb in Akathanu is another story. See below.)

For example, you could have the following grammatical sentences:

1) "Eating (be)."
2) "Eating (be) of-corn."
3) "Eating (be) by-me."
4) "Eating (be) of-corn, by-me."

1 means "Somewhere, sometime, for some reason, someone (or something) is
eating something."
2 means "...someone (or something) is eating corn." and corresponds to the
previous 3.
3 means "...I am eating something." and corresponds to the previous 1.
4 means "...I am eating corn." and corresponds to the previous 2 and 4.

In these examples, the noun-verb acts as the 'subject' (or maybe the topic?)
of the sentence, but I could also make 'me' or 'corn' the subject (for
emphasis), and then mark it on the verb like so:

5) Corn (be) patient-of-eating (by-me).
6) Me (be) agent-of-eating (of-corn).

So, although it may not be strictly correct in grammatical terms to think of
it this way, I think of the "patient-of-" and "agent-of-" markers as
denoting a "passive voice" and "active voice" respectively. In my original
question, I was thinking of 'me' in 5 as being 'ergative' because it is a
non-subject agent, and 'corn' in 6 as being 'accusative' because it is a
non-subject patient. My case markers might end up being more like indicators
of semantic role, than grammatical case.

> 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?

> 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)
Labile? Now there's a term they don't teach in Language Arts 101! But I
can't seem to think of any verbs that are only transitive. Could you give a
good example, so I can see if my non-transitive system can handle it?

> > 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.
Another vote for using that system. At least I had one good idea! :-)

> But that still doesn't suggest that the language is
> ergative.
...........
> > 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.
Well, the ergativity only came about by wanting a non-oblique case for a
non-subject agent. I guess what I'm actually questioning is voice.

> 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.
I think now I can see how we might be describing two sides of (almost) the
same coin. While you define alternate voices as a means of _demoting_
arguments from being required to being optional, I was thinking of them as a
means of _promoting_ arguments, whether optional or not, to the (required)
position of subject. So if I'm understanding you correctly, then with an
originally transitive verb:

Active Voice: Agent (required), Patient (required)
Passive Voice: Agent (optional, oblique), Patient (required)
Antipassive Voice: Agent (required), Patient (optional, oblique)

Is that correct?

Since in English, the subject of a sentence is always required, and with an
active voice transitive verb it is typically the agent, I was (apparrently
incorrectly) viewing voices like this (bear in mind that I wasn't thinking
about transitivity at all):

Active voice: Subject = Agent(required), Object = Patient(may or may not be
present)
Passive voice: Subject = Passive(required), Object = Agent(may or may not be
present)
Antipassive voice: The oppsosite of passive, and thus the same as active.

> 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.
Actually, I stumbled upon this description of Tagalog, which has some
elements similar to what I was trying to describe:
http://www.atoni.com/dila/languages/LanguageFacts/Tagalog.htm

What it calls "Objective voice" and "Agentive Voice" match what I was
previously calling "Passive Voice" and "Active Voice".

Thanks,
~Caleb

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