Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

Isaac wrote:
> Persuasive. In any case, I know too little Georgian to start fighting. I
> merely remember that most our professors in the Univeristy mentioned
> Georgian as a good example of ergative lang. Now I see it was a
> misunderstanding, or just an obsolete view.
Well, a few decades ago, it was common to call all sorts of foreign
looking systems of grammatical relations 'ergative', basically
on the grounds that all languages had either a nom/acc or an erg/abs
alignment.  We now recognize that the situation is considerably more
complicated than that, so we call them by different names.

I was just looking at one site right now, and it repeated this
error.  So it seems to still be floating around.

> Ok. Isn't Basque typically
> ergative? I took a half year course of it 14 years ago :) - will it help?
and Chris responded to this with:
> Yep. :) Basque is very strongly morphologically ergative language. :)
> About the closest you get to accusative behavoir is a progressive
> construction using "ari", where both arguments are marked as absolutive
> and the verb only agrees with the agent, but other than that peripheral
> example, pretty much everything is ergative.
I am not an expert on Basque, but I am given to understand that there
are some split-S characteristics lurking around in it.  Something about
light verbs, IIRC.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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