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Re: Ergative?

From:The RipperDoc <ripperdoc@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 30, 2002, 13:24
> 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". >
I must say that I doesn't understand anything at all of the page you're refering to. Sorry :-) /Martin