Ergative & Basque

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

Thanks to Larry Trask for taking the trouble to answer my questions about
the ergatve in Basque (in mail of Mon, 19 Jul 1999). The message being
quite clear and presumaby helpful to others than me alone, there are just
a few things that prompt a comment:

In a general sense, I understand that there is very little difference
between the ergative and the "accusative" structure. If you say "I have
built a house" with a verb of "having" taking the accusative, then the
construction is not ergative. But if "have" is expressed by "be to/for/at"
or "be" + genitive, and you phrase it as if it meant "there is to me a
built house", or "a built house is mine" or the like with the logical
patient as the subject put in the nominative, then it is ergative.
Strangely, the main idea, the expression of the relation between te agent
and the patient as one of possession ("having") is the same in the two
cases. This seems like a lot of fuss over very little. Now, where "have"
is expressed as "be" + an adverbial case (or the genitive, as in
Lithuanian vyro yra butas "of the man is a house" = 'the man has a
house'), there is a good and straightforward reason to put the
logical agent in a non-nominative case, a reason that never arises with
intransitive verbs which can at best expressed with an _essive_ relation
between the actor and the predicate: "John is laughing", "those days are
gone". This scenario then offers an opportunity for a direct understanding
of the distinction between the subject of an intransitive verb and that of
a transitive one, for one "is", the other "has" (or, is the one to/by etc.
which/whom something is); and it also makes it possible to understand
why the object has the same form as the subject of an intransitive verb,
for both "are". The use of a "have" _verb_ with ergative case as opposed
to a verb "be" with inergative case offers no such understanding,
therefore I find it unattractive if the ergative construction in
general is simply taken for granted; I could much better understand
things if the search is continued back to an origin of the opposition in a
difference between "is" and "there is to" (= "has"). That would make the
ergative just a roundabout use of the same general case categories as
used by the "accusative" syntax. That the search cannot be pushed that far
back for many languages does not change the possibility of such a
prehistory: you can draw no conclusions from inconclusive evidence.

I asked Larry Trask:

>> Can't the underlying construction be analyzed in a sensible way at
>> all?

LT asked back:

> Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "a sensible way".  What would you
> regard as a sensible analysis of English `I have drunk the wine'?

I see the point: How can you have something you have consumed - or
annihilated or lost, to take some even worse examples? You cannot. Then,
how can you justify expressing such events as if you have things you don't
really have? By analogy, by simple extension of the syntactic pattern from
an original core in which it made good sense to a general use where this
is not always the case.

LT also said:

> And this, I think, is as far back as we can go in tracing the prehistory
> of the Basque periphrastic verb-forms.  As I remarked earlier, we have
> no way of knowing whether these things originated as calques on Romance
> or whether they are independent creations in Basque, from an unknown
> source.  All I can tell you is that the modern periphrastic forms were
> clearly already established in Basque by the tenth century, when we find
> the first recorded verb-forms.

I'd say this disqualifies Basque as a language to help us solve the riddle
of the ergative, if there still is one.

Jens