accusative and ergative languages

[Larry Trask]

On Sat, 17 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

> As for the far-reaching conclusions of Dixon based on discourse
> conhesion strategies, in my opinion they are flawed because these
> strategies are purely conventional.

Not so.  Read on.

> In English, I can say: "John hit me, and he went away" or "I hit
> John and he went away". What is the discourse cohesion strategy for
> English?

You've overlooked the crucial null-subject cases:

`John hit me and went away' *must* mean `John went away'.

But `I hit John and went away' *must* mean `I went away'.

Control of null NPs is one of the syntactic properties which crucially
distinguish subjects from non-subjects in English and in some other
languages.  And there is nothing "conventional" about it: this is a rule
of English syntax.

Let me change both NPs to third-person, to avoid any complications with
agreement; suppose I say this:

`John hit Bill and went away'.

Now, in English, it is John who went away, not Bill.  However, according
to my understanding of Dixon, if you say what looks like the literal
equivalent of this in Dyirbal, it is *Bill* who went away, not John.
This is one of the ways in which syntactic ergativity manifests itself
in Dyirbal.

But not all ergative languages are the same here, and probably not even
most.  If you translate this sentence as literally as possible into
Basque, it is once again John who went away, and not Bill, just as in
English.  This is so even though the ergative morphology of Basque is
more thoroughgoing than that of Dyirbal, which is split.

That is, Basque, like English, allows subjects to be coordinated with
subjects, but not with non-subjects.  This is so even when one of the
coordinated subject NPs is ergative and the other absolutive.  Basque
does not allow the absolutive subject of an intransitive sentence to be
coordinated with the absolutive object of a transitive sentence.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk