Re: Ergative?

En réponse à The Gray Wizard <dbell@...>:

>
> While this aspect of ergativity ("morphological ergativity") is the
> most
> obvious, ergative languages often exhibit other features that make
> things a
> bit more complicated.  For one thing, most ergative languages are not
> "strictly" ergative.  That is, many exhibit mixed or split paradigms
> that
> require accusative forms under certain conditions.  AFMCL, amman iar
> uses a
> split ergative paradigm along an animacy continuum that causes speech
> act
> pronouns and demonstratives to take nominative/accusative forms.
> Another,
> often overlooked, aspect of ergativity is "syntactic ergativity"
> whereby
> clause combinations and the omission of coreferential constituents in
> clause
> combinations are subject to ergatively motivated constraints.  This is
> also
> a feature of amman iar.  I discuss these features with a number of
> examples
> at http://www.graywizard.net/Conlinguistics/ergativity.htm  For anyone
> serious about understanding ergativity I would recommend reading
> Dixon's
> text "Ergativity".
>
Well, I know all that, but since the person had stated that he didn't know
anything about ergativity, and since my explanatory skills are limited (I wish
I had the ease of most people here to transform complex concepts into obvious
explanations :(( ), I just gave a simple explanation of pure morphological
ergativity. I thought of adding a bit about split-ergativity, to spice up the
sauce, but decided that my explanations probably had confused the poor guy even
more than he was before (you see how much I trust my skills :)) ), so I stopped
there, knowing that someone else on the list would provide for better
explanations.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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