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Re: Ergativity Question

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 17, 2004, 16:20
On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 04:10:39PM +0100, Tim May wrote:
> I've always understood ["labile"] as referring exclusively to those > verbs which may be used transitively or intransitively such that the > intransitive subject refers to the same role as the transitive object; > e.g. "I broke the bottle"/"The bottle broke".
That matches an old "Ask a Linguist" posting I found, according to which a labile verb is a verb whose syntactic subject can be either very agentive or very patientive. So while the verb "eat" is labile in many English dialects (in which "This chicken sure eats good!" is more likely to refer to the speaker's meal than the chicken's), it would appear not to be one in standard English. Perhaps the following is a better minimal triplet? I pushed the doorbell / *The doorbell pushed. I rang the doorbell. / The doorbell rang. *I chimed the doorbell. / The doorbell chimed. -Marcos