> WAIT, there's more! :-)
>
> Although I heard somewhere that this is rare in natlangs, there's no
reason
> why you couldn't mark the "S" "A" and "O" arguments each in their own
> distinct way, producing a non-accusative, non-ergative core grammar.
>
> Still another kind of marking: semantic marking (as opposed to
syntactic
> marking)
>
> IIRC, nominative/accusative & ergative/absolutive schemes fall under the
> "syntactic" marking category, in which arguments are marked according to
the
> verb's syntactic properties, regardless of the semantic relationships
> between the verb and its arguments.
>
> For instance, in English, we can say "The man opened the box" and "The
door
> opened," placing both the word for "man" and the word for "door" in first
> position (the same syntactic marking) even though "man" is the agent and
> "door" is the patient (different semantic roles). Why? Because,
> syntactically, "open" is an active verb in both sentences. To look at it
> semantically, it *prototypically* stands for an action peformed by an
agent.
>
> In a version of English with direct marking, "the man" and "the door"
would
> be marked differently, something like this:
>
> "The man-agent opened the box-patient." "The door-patient opened."
>
> The marking on the arguments reflects the semantic relationships that the
> arguments have with the verb as it is used in a given sentence, not
> according to the verb's prototypical meaning.
>
> * * *
H.S. Teoh's Ebisedian uses semantic marking, you should read up on
that(forget the address, though).
>Jim G.