SV: accusative and ergative languages

[Fabrice Cavoto]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

>Has anyone given any evidence for ergativity in pre-IE yet?

[Fabrice Cavoto]

No, but the question has been debatted many times,
already by H. Pedersen (1907). But I totally agree with you that there is
no way to see in IE the features that normally are needed to claim that a
lgge. is ergative, so IE, at least at its latest stage, was not ergative.
The interesting question is to try to see if it ever has been, and what
Pedersen (and others after him) did was to try to determine features that
could be TRACES of an anterior ergative type.
Of course, even if someone should find uncontroversial traces, this would
not automatically mean that IE once was ergative, but it could mean that it
had developped an ergative structure in specific parts, or on the contrary
that it had retained those features there: we can't know.
Also it might be right that just like pure ergativity is not found, pure
accusativity might not be found neither, so the supposed traces of
ergativity in IE should not imply that they are traces from an older stage.