Re: ergative + another introduction

ok, ergativity is my obsession, and here's my understanding:

there are two kinds of ergativity: there's morphological ergativity,
which is much more common, and means that there is one case for
subjects of transitive verbs, and another for both subjects of
intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs.  basically, it
means that intransitive subjects are classified as more object-like
than subject-like; if you consider it, this is a reasonable
interpretation, as intransitive verbs are often things that sort of
just happen to their subject.

syntactic ergativity, on the other hand, is much rarer - it's attested
in dyirbal (an austronesian language, pronounced like gerbil, which
amuses me *still*) and possibly in some versions of inuktitut.  it means
that all that above is rooted deeper, as it were, and shows up in the
syntax.  this is most evident in conjoined sentences.  consider the
english sentence:

1) the man kissed the woman and left.

this can only be interpreted as "the man left".  but in dyirbal, the
same structure could only be interpreted as meaning that the woman
left.  why?  because the woman would have the same case as subject of
intransitive "leave" as in object of transitive "kiss", and case
determines what the pivot is.

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.  there are
also languages that can voluntarily switch between modes, to show how
intentional an action was.  there are also *few* (known) languages with
just three different cases for each of the options - subj-trans,
subj-intrans and obj.

does this help?

-kit

On Nov 17, 2004, at 9:08 PM, Erich Kummerfeld wrote:
> What exacly constitutes ergative structure?  I've seen it mentioned
> numerous
> times but I am completely in the dark as far as how it works.  Is there
> perhaps a website someone could link me to, or do any of you want to
> enlighten
> this poor soul about the mysteries of the ergative structure?
>
> Thanks,
> Erich
>
> p.s.  hmm, I still haven't really introduced myself.  My name's Erich
> Kummerfeld, I'm an American College student, I'm 19 years old, I go to
> Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.  I've only recently gotten really
> sucked
> into linguistics and conlanging.  I haven't made any conlangs of my
> own, in
> high school I spent a good year and change constructing a conworld with
> numerous concultures, drew up some detailed maps, wrote histories,
> designed
> cultures and weather patterns etc.  That's essentially the limit of my
> con-
> anything experience.  I took French for a few years in highschool,
> then took a
> very intensive course in Japanese for my senior year, and took a
> semester of
> Spanish recently.  I'm a native speaker of English (obviously).  At
> the moment
> I'm mostly trying to learn as much as I can about the different kinds
> of
> languages, both constructed and natural, as I can as well as people's
> theories
> and strategies of creating conlangs.  I'm starting to compile a list of
> properties that I would like my conlang to have, if/when I make it.  I
> suppose
> the primary one right now that I'm thinking about is word efficeiency
> or,
> since words can be incredibly large at times, syllable efficiency,
> i.e. a
> person should be able to communicate a variety of complex thoughts
> without
> spending a large amount of time speaking.  And I'd like to figure out
> ways to
> do this without having a grotesquely large number of phonemes, as I
> have other
> ideas about what kinds of properties I'm looking for in a set of
> phonemes.
>
> that's a goodly amount of stuff.  It's always fun when the postcript
> is four
> times as long as the actual message.

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