Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Wolfgang Schulze <W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Date: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 8:16 AM

[snip]

>Evidently, this paradigm does not reflect any kind of ERG strategy. Such
>a strategy often has been inferred from the fact that the {S=A}-marker
>*-s seems to have something in common with the genitive (singular (!))
>(*-es, *-os, *-s). From this some kind of 'genitivus-ergativus' had been
>reconstructed from Pre-IE. Naturally, a genitivus-ergativus is attested
>in a considerable number of languages (Yupik-Eskimo, Lak (East
>Caucasian), to name only two). However, again IE *-s does not behave
>ERG, even IF we can associate it with the genitive marker (singular):
>*-(e/o)s also encodes the S-function, which is ANTI ERG.

[snip]

[Ed Selleslagh]

Thank you for this illuminating contribution.
May I add some thoughts?
As you well know German uses such a genitivus-ergativus case with the
passive (and in other constructions, to point at the author), albeit
periphrastically, with the preposition 'von', which could just as well be
called 'ablativus-ergativus', the genitive and the ablative both being
'pointers' to the origin of the action. Note the similarity of the Latin
construction : passive + a(b) + ablative. So, it seems that the need for
some (pseudo-?)ergative way of speaking is still lingering on in IE
languages.
In Basque (an agglutinating ergative language), both the ablative and the
ergative case contain the -k ending, which also occurs in the nominative
plural, in my view derived from a construction implying a kind of
'genitivus/ablativus partitivus' (cf. French 'des gens'; Lat. 'de' also had
an 'ablative meaning'!).

Ed.