User talk:Zeppelin42

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[edit] Ergative morphology

Hi. About your comment on Talk:Ergative-absolutive language, I think that you are missing some things, which I will point out below.

(1) Transitivity. This basically refers to the number of arguments/participants (that is, nouns) in a statement. This is not connected with (morphological) case marking, which tells us the syntactic function of nouns. What you identify with your example "John and I went to the store'' is case marking (at least, I think, that is what you mean). Generally, an intransitive verb only has a subject (1 argument), a transitive verb has a subject and an object (2 arguments), and a ditransitive verb has a subject and two objects (one is a direct object, one is an indirect object) (3 arguments). Thus, in English the verb sleep is intransitive since it can only take a subject as in John is sleeping, while kick is transitive since it (usually) take both a subject and an object as in John is kicking Ishwar and give is ditransitive since it can take a subject and 2 objects as in John is giving Ishwar the book. Coordinated nouns do not affect the transitivity of the verb. So, the following sentences are all transitive:

  • John is kicking Noah
  • John and Noah are kicking Ishwar
  • John is kicking Ishwar and Noah
  • John and Noah are kicking Ishwar and Samantha.

(2) Case marking. This basically identifies what noun is the subject or object. If there are two arguments in a sentence (which would mean it has a transitive verb), the listener will need to know which noun is the subject and which is the object. Thus, case marking enables the speaker to figure this information out by marking each noun with a distinct case. So, in many languages the subject is marked with one case (often called nominative) while the object is marked with a different case (often called accusative). In English the first pronoun I is marked as the subject, first person me is marked as the object.

(3) Ergativity. Ok, given our understanding of case marking defined above, we know that if we have a transitive sentence with a transitive verb and two noun arguments, then morphological case marking can be used to indicate which noun is the subject or the object. What about an intransitive sentence with an intransitive verb and only one noun argument? Here we find that different languages do different things. Assuming that the sole noun argument of an intransitive verb is required to marked with some kind of case marking, there can be at least three different ways to the mark this noun (there are more, but we wont go there):

  1. the noun argument of the intransitive could be marked with the same case as the subject of the transitive sentence (nominative-accusative marking)
  2. the noun argument of the intransitive could be marked with the same case as the object of the transitive sentence (ergative-absolutive marking)
  3. the noun argument of the intransitive could be marked with the third case that is different from both of the noun arguments of the transitive sentence (tripartite marking)

Thus, accusative languages use the same marking for both the subject of transitive sentences and the subject of intransitive sentences while the object of transitive sentencese is marked differently.

Ergative languages use the same marking for both the object of transitive sentences and the subject of intransitive sentences while the subject of transitive sentences is marked differently.

Tripartite languages (which are less common) mark all three arguments differently.

Schematic examples could be as follows:

Accusative langs:

  1. (1) transitive: NOUN1-aaa VERB NOUN2-bbb
  2. (2) intransitive: NOUN3-aaa VERB.

Both subjects NOUN1 and NOUN3 are marked with suffix -aaa.

Ergative langs:

  1. (1) transitive: NOUN1-ccc VERB NOUN2-ddd
  2. (2) intransitive: NOUN3-ddd VERB.

Both NOUN2 (object) and NOUN3 (subject of intransitive) are marked with suffix -ddd.

Tripartite langs:

  1. (1) transitive: NOUN1-eee VERB NOUN2-fff
  2. (2) intransitive: NOUN3-ggg VERB.

All nouns are marked with different suffixes.

Maybe this helps? – ishwar  (speak) 05:18, 26 June 2006 (UTC)