Re: THEORY: active vs. semantic marking languages

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Daniel Andreasson Vpc wrote:

> Tom Wier wrote:
>
> > "Active" is a kinda old-fashioned way to describe these kinds of
> > languages.  Nowadays, it's more usual to call them "split-S", when
> > certain Ns always take certain case agreement, and you just have
> > to know which it is, or "fluid-S", where some verbs may take take
> > either patient or agent marking depending on the context of the
> > sentence.  Dixon wrote at length about this in _Ergativity_
> > (Ch. 4:  "Types of Split System").
I'm not sure I agree with this characterization. I hear/see the term
"active" far more often than I do "split S" or "fluid S". Perhaps that's
because I work with a literature that is firmly entrenched in Sapir's
terminology, I couldn't say. I've never heard a Muskogeanist call the
languages Fluid S, for example. Other people talking aboug Muskogean
languages do so, though. My brief forrays in Siouan languages give
me the same impression.

> I agree with him that one could consider truly split-S languages to
> have syntactic marking just
> like accusative and ergative languages. The
> problem as I see it is that the division into AGT
> and PAT predicates is still based on the semantics
> of the verb, unlike ergative/accusative langs.
Dixon established an idealized description of the facts. Like most
idealizations, they are very rarely met in practice. The majority of
Ergative languages are not purely ergative, for instance. There are some,
but they are in the minority. The same is true to a fair degree of
Nominative languages: most of them have deviations from a purely
nominative-accusative pattern, including dative or genitive objects, or
dative subjects, just to name a couple. Most deviations are semantically
motivated, just like the deviations from Dixon's idealized model.

It just goes to show that most linguists don't give semantics its due
credit in discussion of issues like case and agreement.

> I'm interested to hear other people's thoughts on this
> (especially from Tom, since I'm merely an amateur
> on these matters, and you seem to be more up-to-date
> (not to mention more professional), especially on Dixon's theorys).
I do agree with you in general that Sapir's original "Active-Stative"
terminology is superior to Dixon's. The terminology at least gives you
guidelines about what to expect in general. It doesn't evoke images
of the "control" vs. "non-control" that is frequently found, but at least
it isn't as vague as "Fluid" and "Split".

Marcus