Talk:Ergative-absolutive language

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Contents 1 syntactic ergativity 2 Traces of ergativity in English 3 Active-stative alignment 4 Tagalog 5 Ergativity in Nepali and other IE languages of South Asia 6 Rethinking the Page 7 Languages used in Split ergativity section 8 Article needs editing! 9 Anomolous Passives in English 10 Linked aorist

[edit] syntactic ergativity

Hi.

Hmm. Needs info about syntactic ergativity? And perhaps expansion & more example? - Ish ishwar 05:24, 2005 Jan 6 (UTC)

[edit] Traces of ergativity in English

Can this be considered a consequence of the fact that in Latin the past participle is passive? I remember there were some cases in Lating where the past participle was used in an active meaning. So it seems the -ee form can express two different meanings: passive and/or completion. — Sebastian (T) 19:21, 2005 Apr 24 (UTC)

I am only an armchair linguist. But it seems like the behavior of many English verbs, which can be either transitive or intransitive, exhibit something that we might call a "trace of ergativity." These verbs, when transitive, are of the form s-intrans -- verb -- object, but when one noun element is deleted, they are intransitive verbs with a syntax form s-intrans -- verb, where the intransitive subject is the same as the object of the transitive verb. For example:

"I grow flowers" vs. "The flowers are growing."

"I hung a painting on my living room wall" vs. "A painting hangs on my living room wall."

"These changes improve my opinion of this painting" vs. "My opinion of this painting improves with age."

"I showed the apartment to the potential tenant" vs. "This apartment shows very well."

I could list a lot of other examples, but you get the picture. When one noun is deleted from a transitive sentence, with these kinds of verbs, an intransitive sentence is created where the former object of the transitive verb is the subject of the intransitive verb. Is this not a "trace of Ergativy" in English?

EDIT: I added a sentence referencing the article on ergative verbs.

Kdogg36 23:54, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

This has absolutely nothing to do with traces of ergativity. This is simply ambitransitivity -that is, verbs with dual transitivity possibility. You need to be careful in this matter because what you're talking about is a semantic difference which is not a syntactic difference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.198.68.218 (talk) 23:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that people speaking accusative languages loves to "find" ergative traces in their own language. It is, however, nothing but an oversimplification of the situation.

That fact that "grow" in "I grow flowers" vs. "The flowers are growing" behaves the way it does, does not make it all right to argue the ergativity case because if you replace the "flowers" with their respective pronouns you get "I grow them" vs. "They grow". Here you can clearly see that the intransitive subject and the transitive object are not treated alike as should be the case, if it were a matter of ergativity.

Thus, this is a semantic difference in the verb "grow", not a syntactic evidence/trace of ergativity.

esegel 0:23, 23 January 2008

They could also be considered causitives, as in 'I boil the spaghetti' or 'I walk the dog'. kwami (talk) 22:39, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Isn't escape ditransitive? As in The man escaped the prison. Thus it seems to be a poor example, perhaps even invalidating the claim. Then again, I'm no expert. Zophar (talk) 07:03, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Active-stative alignment

The following raises a question:

However, there are some intransitive verbs in Georgian that behave like transitive verbs, and therefore employ the ergative case in the past tense. Consider:

Katsma daatsemina. "The man sneezed."

Although the verb sneeze is cleary intransitive, it is conjugated like any other transitive verbs. In Georgian there are a few verbs like these, and there has not been a clear-cut explanation as to why these verbs have evolved this way. One explanation is that verbs such as "sneeze" did use to have a direct object (the object being "nose" in the case of "sneeze") and over time lost these objects, and now used independently without stating the object.

Based on what little I know of Georgian, this is not an irregularity, and it is probably not explained by a former direct object now gone, and it is also not split ergativity, but instead it's simply an active-stative paradigm. I'd like to see what other intransitive verbs behave like this.

I found this very useful paper... Active languages, by Daniel Andréasson, and in the Georgian section it says that:

• Georgian is always nominative-accusative with regards to verb agreement, and mostly also in case marking;
• Georgian is almost always ergative-absolutive with regards to case marking in the aorist series (Series II);
• Georgian is not ergative, but active-stative, with regards to case marking in the aorist series of Classes 2 and 3 (called "the intransitive verbs", even though some are not intransitive and there are some intransitives in the other classes). Class 2 verbs mark their subject as patientive (D. A. uses PAT), and Class 3 verbs mark them as agentive (AGT). That's a (restricted) split-S active alignment.

Now, how do we get all that into the article?

--Pablo D. Flores 10:50, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the article; I am going to work on expanding this article after I read the relevant sections. Though I have to say that, the theory of "former object having gone" is not something that is just made up to explain the ergative behavior of verbs such as sneeze. I have discussed this with two people who are native Georgian speakers and teach Georgian, and that is how they have explained it to me. This is also not an irregularity, either (I did not notice; when I wrote the explanation of "sneeze", I did not intend to explain this as an irregularity, is that how it sounds like?) Some other intransitive verbs that behave like sneeze are (I am just going to list a few that comes to my mind right now): Cough, stroll, jump, swim, roll, cry, dance,... (basically many class 3 verbs who just behave like class 1,(transitive verbs), so there are many intransitive verbs that use the ergative case in the aorist screeve, again, which is not an irregularity (I am assuming, you know the verb classes in Georgian(?)).

Many questions! What I said was that, as it was put in the article, it sounded like an irregularity plus an excuse for it. However, what I meant (based on what I read in the paper I referenced), is precisely that there is no irregularity. The intransitive verbs are grouped into Classes 2 and 3 based on an active-stative split (Class 3 being active, which in this case means performed by the subject, even if not volitionally as in sneeze). This is a recognized way of organizing intransitive verbs. However, if Georgian is described as being (or implied to be) purely nom-acc or purely erg-abs, then the treatment of verbs in Class 3 looks like an irregularity or a deviant behaviour (marking an intransitive subject with the ergative case!). This is what I think should be addressed carefully. I don't know much Georgian, except that its system is terribly complicated.

The theory of the "former object having gone" is not ridiculous or made up (it's not what I implied), but after what you told me, I think it may be an a posteriori justification. Native speakers and even teachers (who are not linguists) often rationalize facts about their language in this way. I know this because I'm learning a somewhat complicated language myself (Japanese) and I've heard all sorts of "explanations" for features of the language that are not based on linguistic research but on teacher's tradition.

I think I can write something in the article, but I'd like an actual speaker to double-check it, because my knowledge is limited to the trivia above.

--Pablo D. Flores 11:06, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Then why don't you write what you wish, and I will double check it for you. Although I am not native speaker of Georgian, I have been studying it for a while, and definitely can be helpful.

[edit] Tagalog

The analysis of Tagalog as ergative-absolutive is not accepted unanimously. I've seen Tagalog analyzed as a trigger language, leaving the matter of nom-vs-erg completely aside; and as far as I've been able to research, the language does not fit well in any of the known paradigms. This is the conclusion to an online paper about topicalization in Tagalog:

At the beginning of this paper I noted that a controversy exists on the question of whether Tagalog is a nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive language. This controversy has been predicated on the assumption that topicalization is case-driven movement; that is, that markers like ang and si mark nominals as bearing either nominative or absolutive case. I have tried to show here that this view is incorrect, and that movement to the topic position in Tagalog is more like movement to the pre-verbal slot in languages like Icelandic than it is like passive in English. If this conclusion is right, the question of Tagalog’s case system will have to be completely re-thought. [1]

Another reference:

In another class of languages, the Philippine-type languages, any element of the clause can have unmarked Case; the verb is marked with an affix designating one of its arguments as the nominative (referred to by Philippinists as the topic). [2]

If anything can be turned into a "subject" in Tagalog using voice operations, and no voice is more marked than the others, then it's a moot point to discuss ergativity vs accusativity. At best one should describe Tagalog's morphosyntactic alignment as mixed ergative-absolutive (but that doesn't say much). The first paper I mentioned says Tagalog is syntactically ergative but has some properties of accusative languages (wh-extraction and raising follow the "nominative" argument), and morphologically it is symmetric as to what can be turned into a subject (there's no true passive or antipassive voice).

--Pablo D. Flores 28 June 2005 11:16 (UTC)

Hi Pablo,

Retired linguistics professor and specialist in Austronesian and Philippine languages, Dr. Lawrence A. Reid of the University of Hawai'i, proofread my book In Bahasa Sug: An Introduction to Tausug back in 2002. In it he offered some constructive criticisms as to the way I presented information in my book. The three comments I culled from the Word document deal with ergativity, and they are below.

Tausug is a language that's related to Tagalog and they share many grammatical features.

[LAR14] I would suggest you avoid the use of the ambiguous term ‘object’. Since Tausug appears to be, like most Philippine languages morphologically ergative, you would run into problems, since Nominative typically means grammatical ‘subject’, not ‘object’. In these languages other linguists would label this case as Absolutive, but your use of Nominative fits neatly with what I believe is typologically more appropriate. Why not simply Genitive and Nominative, instead of actor and object?

[LAR43] There is much that I could comment on here. The description of Phil. languages as having a “focus” system, predated the recognition of Philippine languages as generally having an ergative actancy system, and failed to recognise the complete syntactic commonality of the all the non-actor focus constructions which are transitive, having and an Agent and a Patient, or actor and undergoer, from the actor focus constructions which are intransitive, but with no undergoer NP. “Focus” does not place “emphasis” on one of the NPs (emphasis is typically brought about the topicalizing mechanisms), but merely signals in the verb the kind of effect that the verb has on the Nominative NP. I suspect that you are probably not ready to give up the old “focus’ analysis, but I would encourage you to at least note the sytanctic equivalence of the non-actor focus types, and note that they are all transitive, and treat the actor focus types as intransitives, some of which may have more than one complememt, marked either locatively or genitively, but that the second is not a Patient, and is therefore not Accusative. This is not a split ergative system, as has been claimed by some linguists. I could go into arguments for this, but perhaps I am boring you!!

[LAR62] This typological statement is relevant only for accusative languages that have syntactic objects, or Accusative NPs. Tausug is clearly an ergative language and the grammatical subject is the Nominative NP, which in transitive sentences translates as an object. The Genitive NP is not a grammatical subject. Better to characerize the language in terms of the relative order of V and case-marked NPs such as Nom, Gen, Obl, and Locative, etc.

In the end, I did not follow Dr. Reid's advice 100% because I had not yet fully understood ergativity at the time. In the three years that has passed, I realized that I should have done so. I have also been learning some Basque, and I see the similarities between it and Tagalog's (my native language) ergativity system. Being a native speaker of Tagalog made learning Basque just a bit easier. --Chris 30 June 2005 01:59 (UTC)

hi.

Tagalog is not a good example of a prototypical ergative language. Stating this in the list without reservations is rather misleading. Many consider languages like Tagalog to a be distinct "Philippine type". I think that this article can mention Philippine langs as similar to ergative and then give arguments for inclusion and exclusion into this category. This should probably be in a separate section. I havent read so much about this, but I can provide references if desired. I think there are issues in determining subjecthood (like some sentences have 2 subjects).

peace – ishwar  (speak) 15:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

What do you make of the below? It its from: Starosta S., Pawley A. K. & Reid L. A., 1982, The evolution of focus in Austronesian, in S. A. Wurm & L. Carrington (eds), Papers from the Third International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, vol. 2 : Tracking the travellers, Pacific Linguistics C-75, Canberra, Australian National University, p. 145-170. I'll just defer to you from now until I gain a better understanding of this. I think it would be wrong, based on what I know & understand so far, to totally do away with any references to Tagalog. Though, I wonder how Samoan differs from Tagalog in its treatment of ergativity. Do you know? --Chris S. 03:04, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

The claim that PAN was a mixed ergative language is based on the following considerations:

1) Within the lexicase framework, an ergative language is defined as one in which the grammatical subject is always in the Patient case relation. A mixed ergative language is one in which the unmarked subject choice is Patient, but which has one or more classes of derived verbs which choose their grammatical subjects according to Fillmore's (accusative) Subject Choice Hierarchy: Agent first, else Instrument or Correspondent, else Patient (using lexicase labels for the case relations).

2) A number of languages from different primary Austronesian subgroups, including Tongan, Samoan, Ilokano, Palauan, Chamorro, Toba Batak, Paiwan, Amis, and Tagalog (cf. DeGuzman 1978:199) are ergative or mixed ergative in the sense of 1) above.

3) In the mixed ergative languages, the ergative verbstems are often less marked than the accusative ones, and the completely unmarked `root stems' (DeGuzman 1978:199) are always ergative in languages such as Kagayanen (Harmon 1977:111, Table 6) and Toba Batak (van der Tuuk 1971:85,98), where `simple passives' consist of a bare stem, while `active' transitive verbs are derived (cf. Mulder and Schwarz 1979:23 on Kapampangan). That is, Toba Batak `simple passives' are grammatically ergative, since the unmarked subject is the Patient rather than the Agent.

I dont know about Samoan or many of the other languages mentioned above. My general impression is that Tagalog is similar to active-stative systems where what is marked are primarily semantic roles, but in addition, Tagalog has pragmatic marking through the topic/focus marker. I think what is being considered here is primarily morphological marking, i.e. the prepositional particles (or whatever they are usually called). How the syntax works is something (even more) outside of my knowledge. I think there are problems determining subjects where different syntactic tests point to different arguments having the status of subject.

Tagalog has been analysed by many people in many different ways. I dont know if there is really any consensus about which is a better analysis. It is probably good to consult general typological and specific language/language family works to get a good picture.

There is good reason to mention these languages here. But, perhaps, they really need their own article. An adequate coverage of the topic will probably be rather technical and definitely require research (at least for me). Also, Wikipedia will need to have better coverage of surrounding topics (like a more rigorous description of subject in its respective article, including tests determining subjecthood). – ishwar  (speak) 23:38, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ergativity in Nepali and other IE languages of South Asia

Nepali has an ergative/instrumental construction by adding -le after a noun. It can be used ergatively with a subject: "Ram-le dunga halyo." meaning "Ram threw the stone." It can also be used instrumentally with an object: "Ma ama-le pakayeko bhat kaye.", meaning "I ate the rice cooked by my mother." Apparently there are parallel constructs in other north indian IE languages.

[edit] Rethinking the Page

I am attempting to get a better grip on the exact function/import of ergativity, but this article is too complex for me to dig through. This is my fourth attempt (in over a month) at trying to figure out what the heck it means through this one Wikipedia article. Isn't there some simpler way to state its definition than "An ergative-absolutive language is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs"? I understand what every word of that sentence means. But it is at once thoroughly confusing and also unable to convey the deeper meaning of ergativity. I think it needs some work.

Furthermore, the representation of the ergative vs. accusative section does nothing to elucidate my confusion. I still understand what object/subject/agent mean. But what does the chart represent? Is it saying that the nominative forms of the object are different from those of the accusative in N-A languages? And still, what does it mean? There should be some more thorough examples included in this specific chart. It wouldn't be hard. Just enough to show someone like me what constitutes "different" or "same" once you have made those declarations.

Mind you, I understand a lot about comparative linguistics - though mostly through my own observations and experience - and I am still struggling with the meaning of ergativity, or rather ergativity in contrast with other modes of linguistic expression. Understand very well what transitivity means (i.e. the reason we say "John and I went to the store" instead of "John and me..."). But if someone of my patience and background has trouble understanding the article, doesn't it concern anyone here that other readers/users might have the same troubles? -z42

Well, it's a wiki for a reason; if you have thoughts about how to make the article clearer, you should do so. Appealing to others' concernedness makes no sense to me.

Personally, I think the article explains it rather clearly; whereas nominative-accusative languages (like English) mark the arguments of intransitive verbs (S) the same way as the agents of transitive verbs (A), ergative-absolutive languages mark them the same way as the patients of transitive verbs (O). Whereas English says "I looked around, and I saw him" (using I with both verbs), ergative English would say "Me looked around, and I saw him" (using me with the intransitive verb).

Ruakh 11:20, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I don't have any kind of formal linguistic training, and think that the article is clear as it is. The problem is, of course, that the topic is absolutely abstract and assumes that you've already acquired some familiarity with more basic related topics. This is to be expected, since no article can start from scratch. Maybe more examples would be a good idea, though. —Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 14:21, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I dont't understand what you mean with the "John and me"-example. It doesn't really have much to do with transivity. That a verb is transitive means that it has a subject and an object. Eliae 16:41, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it seemed that some different concepts were confused. See my note to z42: User talk:Zeppelin42#Ergative morphology. peace – ishwar  (speak) 19:39, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I understand exactly why -z42 wrote what they wrote and it would be rather pushing it to advise, as Ruakh does, that someone as confused as -z42 admits to being about what ergativity is should suggest how to clarify the concept of ergativity on Wikipedia. Having just read the article for the first time, I must say that it didn't start well for me either. The first sentence may be a good wide-ranging definition but it is far too general for people like -z42 and me to make much sense of on a first read-through. What does it mean to "treat distinctly from"? The question arises in my mind, "in every respect, only in certain respects or merely in respect to morphology?" Dixon's wording, "treated in the same way", leaves the lay person none the wiser from the start but least he swiftly moves on to indicate that it was through the ergative case that such a phenomenon became a concern in linguistics. Notably this Wikipedia article deals primarily with matters of case in order to explicate the feature; would it therefore not be helpful to define ergativity by anchoring the opening definition within the example of cases as the most direct way of informing the lay linguist? Or is Wikipedia merely to be here for buffs? As this is English wikipedia, one can also validly use contrast with English grammar in order to convey the concept. Perhaps a good opening for the lay reader might read like the following.

""An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the patient of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. The feature is sometimes found in syntax but is chiefly observable in the morphology of nouns, ie, in an ergative-absolutive language, one might say, as it were, "HE loves HIM" but one would also say "HIM cares" instead of "HE cares".

Nominative-accusative languages such as English use one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the agent of an transitive verb but another case for the object, eg, "HE cares" (intransitive) and "HE loves him" (transitive). Ergative-absolutive languages work differently by using one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb but another case for the agent, eg, as it were, "HIM cares" (intransitive) and "He loves HIM" (transitive). In this context, HE would be the ergative case and HIM the absolutive case.""

I propose that these simple examples in English are a very immediate way of demonstrating this linguistic feature in terms of case and would be best placed right at the head of the article. The pictures would more usefully come in later as a secondary method of signifying the pattern for the reader's mind once they have already anchored their thinking in example sentences.

I also suggest either removing the word 'subject' and replacing it with the terms 'agent' and 'patient' or removing the words 'agent' and 'subject' and replacing them with the terms 'subject of transitive verb' and 'subject of intransitive verb'. Using the word 'agent' here without the complementary expression of 'patient' and in conjunction with the word 'subject' as terminology to cover both ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative languages seems inconsistent. If the article is going to use the word 'subject' in relation to nominative-accusative language, it is perhaps inadvisable to create the impression for any length of time during reading that an 'agent' is different from a 'subject'. Likewise, either ergative-absolutive grammar has subjects or it doesn't, of course, and if the article is going to use a grammatical term from nominative-accusative grammar such as 'agent' INSTEAD of the word subject, it should also use the term 'patient' instead of the word subject. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.225.35 (talk) 10:48, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Languages used in Split ergativity section

In the Split ergativity section, two lines of devanagari Hindi are given, with what I assume is their Latin transliteration below them. But what are the phrases in the boxes; i.e. "Kur pirtûkekê dikire" and "Kurî pirtûkek kirî"? This is confusing. 198.150.76.150 13:07, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Good question. It was added without comment by an unregistered user — http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ergative-absolutive_language&diff=56935397&oldid=54171773 — and hasn't been touched since, probably because no one knew what it was supposed to be. I'll remove it, since right now it's not contributing anything at all to the article; if someone can explain what it is, that might make a difference. Ruakh 15:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, Pablo-flores beat me to it. :-) Ruakh 15:18, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Hadn't seen your comment. BTW I also took out the devanagari, which is distracting and useless in this context. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 15:21, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article needs editing!

I, too, find this article unnecessarily obtuse. I'm not a linguist, just someone interested in languages. However, might it not be more informative to provide examples of ergativity (and accusitivity) from the standpoint of ENGLISH than obscure foreign languages? Since it's obvious that anyone on this page understands English, wouldn't it make the most sense to provide a framework for a concept based on a common foundation?

The only part of the article I truly understand is the '-ee' example. Since 'ergativity' must derive from the term for 'work' or 'doer' the concept must have something to do with marking who is doing what.

On the other hand, it would be also helpful if citations were used to provide further help. The accusative example from what little I know appears to be Japanese, it might be helpful to note that for others who might want to track down Japanese linguistic traits.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.125.95.49 (talk • contribs) .

English isnt an ergative language. Neither is most of Europe. So, we need to show an example of a language that may be "obscure" to European language speakers (excepting Basque, of course). The concept is as explained in the article. It is easiest to show ergativity by comparing the different case marking patterns in an ergative language and an accusative language with the same word order. English also hardly has case marking either (only pronouns are marked for case). English is not suitable to show ergativity. Japanese and Basque conveniently have SOV word order and case markers that follow the noun.

The article does state that Japanese is the accusative language example. Sorry. – ishwar  (speak) 21:41, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi! This being Wikipedia, you should feel free to make changes that you think are helpful. That being said, the problem is that English isn't an ergative-absolutive language. -ee is actually a really bad example of ergativity (it has some ideas in common, but is very different in key ways); the only reason it's included is that it's the closest thing English has. I don't think we can give any more English examples of ergativity. As for accusativity, I think you're right that we should use English rather than Japanese; would you like to start the undertaking of that change? Ruakh 21:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I suggest that the use of examples of English pronouns in order to demonstrate how English does NOT work shows very clearly to the English speaker how differently to English ergative-absolutive languages DO work. The didactic principle here is contrast, specifically between the morphology of nominative and accusative cases and in relation to agent, patient and object and transitive/intransitive verbs. The use of examples such as "HIM cares" and "HE loves him" etc can and do indicate this. One can then proceed to concrete examples in ergative-absolutive languages to show the precise morphological application in grammatical context in the pertinent languages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.225.35 (talk) 11:16, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Anomolous Passives in English

Can someone please explain the sentence:

'I was given a book'

I wasn't given at all, the book was given. In Latin, Russian, German etc 'I' in this sentence would be in the dative case. Why don't we say in English:

'Me was given a book'?

Any ideas? Does this have anything to do with ergativity?

TAF

No, nothing to do with ergativity, but rather with animacy. Animate and human things tend to be more central to language than inanimate or non-human things, and it's very common among the world's languages for the sole object of verbs like 'give' to be the recipient rather than the patient. You can see in English that we can have it both ways: "he gave the book to me" (core object = book) --> "the book was given to me", as well as "he gave me the book" (core object = me) --> "I was given the book". A lot of languages are restricted to one or the other of those two options. kwami 22:53, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

There are two things going on here. Firstly, English's passive voice can promote direct objects (accusatives), indirect objects (datives), or objects of prepositions (ablatives/prepositional-accusatives); see English passive voice. Secondly, the object so promoted always ends up in the subjective (nominative) case, as in most languages. —Ruakh_TALK 00:57, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Linked aorist

Note that that article needs help, if anyone here is buff on this term. MaxEnt (talk) 19:44, 14 December 2007 (UTC)