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Why the Nominative won &the Ergative lost | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4734 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 9 of 23 28 July 2013 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of the things I still don't understand is with what is the conjugated verb agreeing. If one must use ergative alignment in the past in Hindi(and why specifically in the past did this develop?), would then not the ergative of a formerly Nominative intransitive verb/sentence in the present ("the man sleeps"), then always be a dummy entity? (since no one actually can be an ergative agent of "to sleep"). Thus = "There was a being asleep of the man". Here there can be no real entity in the ergative CAUSING the man to sleep, since "to sleep" in many languages is intransitive (unless Hindi has a distinction between Patient-intransitives and Agent-intransitives, thus being an active-stative language).
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| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5384 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 10 of 23 28 July 2013 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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You cannot use the ergative form marked by -ने (-ne) in the present, so there is no dummy possible, because it would be an agrammatical sentence. The same is valid for verbs like "to sleep". They cannot govern an ergative form.
This split ergativity developed because ony in the past the use of a participle instead of a finite verb form was prevalent, not in the present. Edited by Cabaire on 28 July 2013 at 11:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| freakyaye Senior Member Australia Joined 4623 days ago 107 posts - 152 votes | Message 11 of 23 29 July 2013 at 3:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't mean to sound emo, but couldn't our self serving natures prefer the nom to be marked?
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6488 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 23 29 July 2013 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that some of the explanation lies in the term the OP used for the subject of an intransitive verb: "experiencer". The point with this terminology is that the lone element attached to a monovalent verb isn't felt as something (or somebody) which (or who) just experience things - the speakers of nom-akk languages treat subjects of intransitive and transitive as more or less the same thing, whereas an object is something quite different: if I just do something out in the blue air then I'm the same one as I am in a situation where I do something to something else. In contrast the rationale behind an ergative grammar is that I may do something to an object, but if I don't do it then the darned thing will do so by itself. And maybe cultures with that basic attitude are also cultures with less potential for expansion - though that claim is of course totally unprovable and deeply unscientific. Btw. it has been claimed that Proto-Indoeuropean was ergative, which muddles the waters somewhat - but the evidence for that hypothesis is apparently quite shaky. It is more likely that the old Indo-European languages used subjectless sentences in that situation, like German still does with "mir ist kalt", where the indirect (dative) object in the true sense of the word is an experiencer.
The nearest thing to an ergative rationale we have got in Western languages like English is found in a number of verbs with double semantics. You can say that "I split the wood", but also that "wood splits (by itself) when it gets dry". Isn't it somewhat unsettling that things just do what it pleases them to do around you?
This quote reminds me of a passage in the Wikipedia article on ergative-absolutive languages: English has derivational morphology that parallels ergativity in that it operates on intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs. With an intransitive verb, adding the suffix -ee to the verb produces a label for the person performing the action: "John has retired" → "John is a retiree" "John has escaped" → "John is an escapee" However, with a transitive verb, adding -ee does not produce a label for the person doing the action. Instead, it gives us a label for the person to whom the action is done: "Mike employs Susie" → "Susie is an employee" "Mike has appointed Susie" → "Susie is an appointee" Etymologically, the sense in which "-ee" denotes the object of a transitive verb is the original one, arising from French past participles in "-é". This is still the prevalent sense in British English: the intransitive uses are all 19th-century American coinages and all except "escapee" are still marked as "chiefly U.S." by the Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by Iversen on 29 July 2013 at 12:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5091 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 13 of 23 14 August 2013 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Germanic languages, especially German and Scandinavian" have something that nearly is the same as ergative marking. In for example Norwegian, you generally construct a sentence with an intransitive verb and an indefinite subject as a transitive sentence. The subject is treated like an object and you put in a dummy subject to fill the subject place. Example:
Det kommer en gul bil - litterally: It comes a yellow car - There comes a yellow car. Also the English equivalent looks like an ergative construction. The logics of ergativity is actually very simple. Most intransitive verbs are actually implicite reflexive verbs. They express that you actually do an action on yourself. You have then 3 possibilities: - Express the subject-object as a subject, and then it is implicite in the meaning of the verb that this is also logically the object - nominative alignment. - Express the subject-object as an object, and the meaning of the verb imply that this is also logically a subject - ergative alignment. - Use a reflexive constrution, a choise that is fairly common for many such verbs in European languages, especially Romance languages. In Norwegian you can do so for nearly all intransitive verbs for certain stylistic purposes. For other intransitive verbs that express some stative state, the participant is neither a doer nor a patient. In those cases one simply has to choose some way of introducing the participant, and an ergative alignment is equally logical as a nominative one. Edited by Aquila123 on 14 August 2013 at 12:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5384 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 14 of 23 14 August 2013 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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In German, the subject is still in the nominative and the verb agrees with it in number:
Es kommt der Mann (not 'den Mann). - "it comes the man" Es kommen die Männer. - "it come the men" The dummy is only a filler, because the verb has to come second place. The concept of ergativity makes no sense in this construction, only the word order is changed: Subject Verb --> Filler Verb Subject Edited by Cabaire on 14 August 2013 at 4:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5091 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 15 of 23 14 August 2013 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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German is perhaps not a very good example. In Scandinavian the filler is treated as the grammatical subject and the real participant is treated as the grammatical object, and no case inflection disturbs the picture.
Edited by Aquila123 on 14 August 2013 at 6:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5384 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 16 of 23 14 August 2013 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I do not understand, why you think there is an object, only because it stands after the verb.
If you say: Der kommer de med frokosten (There they come with the breakfast), de is certainly no object, because this would be dem. And in the past you could say a bit old-fashioned: Der kommo de med frokosten, the verb agrees with de, not with der. The structure is the same as in German. Or would you say, that in Idag kommer jag, the word jag is an object? And in this construction the sentences Der kommer de and Der spiser de hvidkål are the same, in an ergative language they would use different forms for de PS. These examples are supposed to be Swedish. PPS. I do not think the word ergative has much sense, if there is no case system in a language. Edited by Cabaire on 15 August 2013 at 12:09am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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