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Why the Nominative won &the Ergative lost | ||
Tags: Syntax | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 23 27 July 2013 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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In overall numbers, Nominative-Accusative aligned languages well outnumber Ergative-
Absolutive languages. Not only that, in number of actual speakers, Nom-Acc speakers overwhelm Erg-Abs speakers. And even further, all the languages with hundreds of millions of speakers are Nom-Acc, not one is Erg-Abs. Since such disparity in several countable parameters can hardly be "just a coincidence", I would dare to conclude there must be some advantage of marking the AGENT of a transitive verb and the EXPERIENCER of an intransitive verb (both as "subject") as one case, and the OBJECT of a transitive verb as a different case, vs marking the EXPERIENCER of an intransitive verb and the OBJECT of a transitive verb as one case (both as "patient"), and the AGENT of a transitive verb as a different case. If most of you had your head spinning cartwheels with the last paragraph, don't worry, it is very complicated to get a grip of the syntactical alignment stuff. I have been reading it for a year and only now it is totally clear in my head. I'm sure this has been debated before and while I welcome any opinions, I was wondering if people here may know of good reads on this subject. Edited by outcast on 27 July 2013 at 6:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 23 27 July 2013 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find the topic very interesting and this made me wonder if there are more than these two ways in natural languages to understand relation of doer and the done. I can't say I still understand ergativity after looking into it a little, and it would be great if anyone could explain it with examples.
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| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4846 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 3 of 23 27 July 2013 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, there are more ways to express the relations between agens and patiens, especially in Austronesian, Australian, and Native American languages: Morphosyntactic alignment. I'm far from being able to explain them though.
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| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5601 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 23 27 July 2013 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is not the nominative who won, but the indo-european languages, who had that great victory in the world and eradicated the languages with an ergative feature.
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 23 28 July 2013 at 12:43am | IP Logged | ||
Indo-European languages are not the only languages that use nominative-accusative distinction. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5601 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 23 28 July 2013 at 12:58am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, there is FINNISH (and literary Arabic, Hungarian, Turkish etc.), but if you ignore the indo-european languages on the map, I would not say, that the other ones dominate over the ergative languages (Georgian, Greenlandic, Basque, Tibetan). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7146 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 7 of 23 28 July 2013 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Note that some Indo-European languages also display ergativity. Kurmanji Kurdish, Hindi-Urdu, Pashto, etc.
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| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5601 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 8 of 23 28 July 2013 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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In languages like Hindi, ergativity is used for the past tense. This is a newly aquired feature (well, thousand years ago), because of the heavy nominalisation of Sanskrit.
Consider these sentences (A: Accusative, N: Nominative) I (N) see the man (A) The man (N) sleeps. Now participal constructions were prefered: There was a beeing seen of the man by me. There was a being asleep of the man. You see, that "the man", who was formerly once A and once N is now in the same position of the sentence, but the subject of the first and second are now used different. When this construction of the sentence became obligatory, ergativity was created. The participle used was the Participle past passive ending in -ta in constructions like: Rama entered the city. रामेण अपि नगरं प्रविष्टम् rāmeṇa api nagaraṁ praviṣṭam. Edited by Cabaire on 28 July 2013 at 2:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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