Re: ergative + another introduction

From:    Kit La Touche <kit@...>
> are you talking about unergative/unaccusative?
No.

> yes, everything is
> somewhat ergative, somewhat accusative in that a given verb will have a
> more or less agentive subject, but i think the distinction here is what
> way the syntax chooses to look at it.
What I meant is that it is probably the case that every language has
morphological or syntactic manifestations of an ergative alignment,
such as the one I gave before.  Unergativity and unaccusativity are
relevant only to the extent that an unaccusative pattern may carry
over to all intransitive verbs (i.e., to unergative verbs), and thus
ipso facto becomes an ergative pattern.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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