Re: Unaccusative...Unergative...Ergative...neep?

On Wed, 26 Dec 2001 16:12:31 EST, Elliott Lash <AL260@...> wrote:

>Hello All!!
>
>I'm currently reading a book called "Events as Grammatical Objects" which
>is quite interesting and very worthwhile if your interested in Syntax and
>other things. Anyways, I'm a bit confused over the terms Unaccusative,
>Unergative and Ergative all of which are used a lot in the book.
The former two were once explained on this list by Matt Pearson (IIRC).
Try to search the archives. (The same may help with "ergative", too, but
this has been discussed too many times in too many contexts...)

>I'm also
>interested in knowing what they are...since I'm a linguistics major for god
>sakes! I mean, shouldn't I know what these things are? :)  Also, I think
>that an understanding of the terms could help in making another
>breakthrough in understanding the weirdness of several aspects of
>Silindion's verb structure which I was never quite sure about. :) Thanks
>a lot for any help!
>
>Elliott

Basilius