> From: Christophe Grandsire
>
> 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.