accusative and ergative languages

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 1999 7:37 AM

Pat wrote:

>> "Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the Spanish
>> phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin phrase, 'he/she'
>> indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have understood that I was
>> referring to languages which do not code the subject with affixes on the
>> verb.

R-S responded:

> No, it was not clear that you were referring to this kind of languages.
> Let's have a look at one of those, though:

> KhalkhaMongolian (no subject affixes on the verb):

> Nom chamd yavuulav.

>  (He, she, it, someone, nobody, I, we, you and whatnot) -"book (indefinite
> acc.)", "to-you", "sent". (Someone) sent you the book. "Someone" is not the
> translation, but the dummy for every agent you wish and which can be made
> clear by the context; it is overtly expressed by nuffin'. The
> extra-syntactic context, that is. A perfectly normal sentence in context.
> It is true that Khalkha does use the personal pronouns in examples like
> this to disambiguate, but it doesn't have to. The construction is certainly
> not ungrammatical.

Pat responds:

I do not readily have access to material on Khalkha Mongolian so I cannot
comment in detail on your example.

However, in general, I would hazard the guess that, regardless of its
apparently accusative construction, for all practical purposes, this
sentence could be just as easily translated: 'A book was sent to you'.  I am
also a little sceptical of an "accusative" in such a context which is marked
by -0.

But, having said that, I am willing to concede that for *some* accusative
languages, this construction, provided a nominative subject can be mentally
supplied from context, is grammatical.

Pat

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