Interpreting ergative sentences

[Larry Trask]

On Wed, 14 Jul 1999, Eduard Selleslagh wrote:

> Speaking about Castilian, I would like to have your views on a peculiarity,
> or rather a tendency, that is still productive at least in popular speech
> ('le-ismo'), namely the tendency to use the indirect subject form where all
> other Latin (and other West-European) languages use the direct object form,
> and almost exclusively with persons (animate), e.g. "le ví" ("le vi' "), "I
> saw him".

> It has sometimes be suggested that this was a substrate influence from
> Basque, an ergative language (that lacks an accusative, of course), but
> opinions are extremely divided on this subject. 

Indeed.  I have seen this suggestion in print, and I've replied to it in
print.  The observation is that Castilian fails to distinguish direct
and indirect objects as sharply as other Romance languages.  The
suggestion is that this results from Basque substrate influence.  But
this suggestion would only make sense if Basque were a language that
also failed to distinguish direct and indirect objects sharply.  And
it's not.

In Basque, direct and indirect objects are sharply and absolutely
distinguished in all respects.  The two differ in case-marking, in
verbal agreement and in ability to be passivized.  This is true in all
circumstances without exception.  In fact, I would say that Basque
distinguishes direct and indirect objects more sharply than any Romance
language I know of, and more sharply than English.  (English has
sentences like `My wife gave me this book', in which it is a moot point
what kind of object`me' might be.)

Accordingly, I can't for the life of me see how Basque substrate
influence could be invoked to account for the Castilian facts.  True,
Basque has no accusative case, but it does have a very well-defined
class of direct objects and a very well-defined class of indirect
objects, and these two classes are entirely distinct in every
morphological and syntactic respect I can think of.  Given what I've
read about objects in the literature, I would say that, if anything,
Basque is rather unusual in its absolute distinction between the two
kinds of object.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk