Re: ergative + another introduction

From:    Kit La Touche <kit@...>
> there are two kinds of ergativity: there's morphological ergativity,
> which is much more common, [...] syntactic ergativity, on the other
> hand, is much rarer
I think the reality is that every language shows some features of
ergativity and some features of accusativity.  As I mentioned sometime
back, in English the "-ee" suffix represents an ergative relation,
representing the single arguments of intransitives and the patient
arguments of transitives:  "arrivee" (from "X arrives") but "employee"
(from "Y employs X").  One partial exception is Hurrian. Apparently,
no one has found any accusative-like features in it so far, but I
know the guy who's working on a grammar of it at the Oriental Institute
here in Chicago, and I suspect he just hasn't gotten around to that
feature of the grammar yet.  It's also not clear to what extent one
can derive generalizations about alignment of grammatical relations
on a language that's been dead for over 3000 years...

(Interestingly, it seems many, perhaps a majority, of the languages
of the ancient Near East like Hurrian were not organized around a
nominative-accusative alignment.)

 =========================================================================
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

Reply