accusative and ergative languages

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

>[PR]

>Rather overly broad! I have heard conversations that go along the lines of
>'He hit the boy' with the adressee responding, 'Who hit him, John or Phil?'
>Unless you consider clarification a gibberish-process.

The explanation for this is, obviously, that speaker A had reasons to
believe (or was unattentive to reasons against this) that the reference was
clear enough for B from any kind of context (previous discourse, situation,
accompanying gesture, or whatnot). The gist is that, unless you want to be
deliberately opaque, you use anaphoric pronouns to refer to a referent
which is somehow identifyable by your addressee. You may, however, be wrong
about this, and then you may expect a clarifying question. The very fact
that this clarifying question makes up for a meaningful and
often-encountered micro-dialogue in your example bespeaks the
less-than-fully-acceptable nature of a communication strategy which opens a
conversation with anaphora, without making sure that everyone knows who you
refer to by "he".

And, by the way, this makes up for a crucial difference between person
marking on the verb and overt pronouns. Though both have comparable
functions (reference identification), the former is hardly ever explicitly
anaphoric. It would be interesting to watch out for a language with verbal
affixal person marking, which would only be used for anaphora, and
suppressed in other cases. I'm not aware of such a language, but I may be
missing the very obvious at the moment. Any ideas, someone ?

St.G.

Stefan Georg
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