Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

Vidhyanath Rao vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu
Tue Jun 8 13:50:35 UTC 1999


Wolfgang Schulze <W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:

> If we look at the question of ERG and passive, we can sometimes observe
> a tendency to establish a pseudo-ergative strategy based on the passive
> (some modern Indo-Iranian languages, partly Cl. Armenian etc.).

The (middle and) ModIA ergative construction in the past should not be
traced to a passive. It is based on the descendent of the -to adjective,
which in Indic was always >resultative<. mr.ta means dead, not killed. More
tellingly, a:ru:d.ha, `mounted' had an active meaning. It is called ``past
passive pariticiple'' because 19th c. grammar writers did not have better
terminology.

[It is not past either: s'uddha means `clean', not `cleaned'; ka:nta,
`beloved' does not mean that the love is past, any more than the English
word does in English. Some deny the name participle to this form on general
grounds, see Bruenis, ``the nominal sentence in Sanskrit and MidIA.]

 There are good pragmatic reasons why resultative adjectives seem to have
ergative-like agreement. If such constructions are used for general
adjectives, it may seem like there are traces of ergativity. I wonder if
such an explanation would work for PIE.

Regards
-Nath



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