Re: ergative + another introduction

At 11:54 AM 11/18/2004 -0500, Kit La Touche wrote:
>[...snip...]
>now, there are also things like split-ergative languages (i believe
>hindi is?) which use morphological ergativity in certain structures -
>in hindi, i think it's when the verb is in the imperfective.
Actually, it's just the opposite: ergative when the verb is perfective,
accusative when it's imperfective.  This kind of pattern (split ergativity
based on the tense and/or aspect of the verb) is quite widespread in the
Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European, but it's always ergative with past or
perfective, accusative with nonpast or imperfective, never the other way
around.

There's also another kind of split ergativity, where the split is based on
the animacy of the noun phrase.  This is very widespread among the
Australian languages.  The way it works is that there's an animacy
heirarchy that goes something like: 1st- and 2nd-person pronouns >
3rd-person pronouns > proper nouns > animate common nouns > inanimate
common nouns.  NPs higher on the heirarchy have nominative-accusative
morphology; those lower on the heirarchy have ergative-absolutive
morphology.  The cutoff point is language-specific, and is sometimes
fuzzy.  (For common nouns, there may be a continuum of more animate to less
animate, rather than a clear-cut boundary between animate and inanimate;
for instance, a human may be more animate than a kangaroo, which in turn is
more animate than an insect, which in turn is more animate than a
rock.)  Also, there may be _two_ cutoff points: the lower boundary of the
accusative range (A) and the upper boundary of the ergative range (B) may
not coincide.  If A is lower than B, the accusative and ergative ranges
overlap, giving a tripartite system for some part of the
heirarchy.  Likewise, if A is higher than B, there's a part of the
heirarchy that has neither accusative nor ergative marking: a "clairvoyant"
system.  All of these possibilities are attested in Australian languages,
though some are more common than others.  But again, for all their
differences, the _direction_ is always the same: accusative correlated with
high animacy, ergative with low animacy, never the reverse.  (This makes
intuitive sense to me, because the less animate an NP is, the less likely
it is to be the agent in a transitive sentence, and thus the more "natural"
it seems to give it some special marking when it _is_ an agent.)

>[...snip...]
>
>-kit
- Tim (delurking and just getting caught up with the list)

Reply