Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU <CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 5:22 AM

[ moderator snip ]

>To which Ed Selleslagh responded:

>>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.

>That's pushing it a bit far.  German also uses _durch_ 'through' for this
>purpose, mainly for less active participants.  English uses _by_.  Ancient
>Greek used _hypo_ 'under'.  And so it goes.  But what do these have in common?
>Surely not a tendency toward a combined ergative-genitive case.  Rather, we
>have the phenomenon that languages have definite ideas about which
>prepositions are appropriate for non-local functions, but their choices are
>largely arbitrary and differ from language to language (or region to region).
>Most Americans wait *for* the bus, but people in Memphis can also wait *on*
>the bus to come.  Germans wait _auf den Bus_ -- *onto* the bus.  I often tell
>my German students: "Never trust a preposition."  That's exaggerated, of
>course, but a useful warning to them *not* to translate English usage into
>German.

>Meanwhile, we wait for, or on, or onto, or even simply await, a better
>explanation of agentive _von_ in German.

>Leo

[Ed]

Generally speaking, I agree with you about the relative arbitrariness of the
choice of prepositions.  However, these choices are between a limited number
of approaches, each with its own logic, especially in the context of the
agentative cum pseudo-ergative construction.

a)The German construction with 'von' and the Latin one with 'ab' follow the
logic of pointing at the origin of the action, and so constitutes an
'ablative/genitive of origin' approach.  It is closest to the actual ergative
in Basque, at least in my view.  In my opinion, this is a sufficient
explanation for the agentative use of 'von'.

b)The German construction with 'durch' ('door' in Dutch, 'by' in English) is
an 'instrumental' approach. (Basque -z case, which I believe to be the
origin of Castilian patronymics ending in -(e)z: many of them have Basque
forms of Christian names preceding the ending: e.g. Ibane (Juan), Pere or
Peru(Pedro), or Basque morphology when using Castilian names: JuaRez, from
JuaN)

c)The classical Greek with 'hypó + genitive' denotes a 'subject-dominated'
approach, something happening 'under the control, influence... of',
nonetheless with a rather strong shade of the 'ablative/genitive/origin'
approach contained in the use of the genitive instead of a dative or
accusative.  It is clear that in the case of the preposition 'hypó' the case
used with it is all-important since it fundametally affects the true meaning
of 'hypó'.

No wonder, to me, that ablative, instrumental and locative fused
morphologically into one 'ablativus' in Latin.

>>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]

See also my response to Iñaki Agirre Pérez.

Ed.