Re: Ergativity Question

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