Re: ergative + another introduction

are you talking about unergative/unaccusative?  yes, everything is
somewhat ergative, somewhat accusative in that a given verb will have a
more or less agentive subject, but i think the distinction here is what
way the syntax chooses to look at it.  am i making sense, or am i
blathering?  i think i might be blathering...

-kit

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> From:    Kit La Touche <kit@...>
> > there are two kinds of ergativity: there's morphological ergativity,
> > which is much more common, [...] syntactic ergativity, on the other
> > hand, is much rarer
>
> I think the reality is that every language shows some features of
> ergativity and some features of accusativity.  As I mentioned sometime
> back, in English the "-ee" suffix represents an ergative relation,
> representing the single arguments of intransitives and the patient
> arguments of transitives:  "arrivee" (from "X arrives") but "employee"
> (from "Y employs X").  One partial exception is Hurrian. Apparently,
> no one has found any accusative-like features in it so far, but I
> know the guy who's working on a grammar of it at the Oriental Institute
> here in Chicago, and I suspect he just hasn't gotten around to that
> feature of the grammar yet.  It's also not clear to what extent one
> can derive generalizations about alignment of grammatical relations
> on a language that's been dead for over 3000 years...
>
> (Interestingly, it seems many, perhaps a majority, of the languages
> of the ancient Near East like Hurrian were not organized around a
> nominative-accusative alignment.)
>
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