accusative and ergative languages

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Ralf-Stefan and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de>
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 1999 4:50 AM

Pat wrote:

>> I do not think you are responding to what I am saying. Your examples suggest
>> to me that you are under the impression that I denied that ergative
>> structure could develop from accusative structure. I did not say that nor do
>> I believe that. I do continue to believe that any language which is
>> presently or has been accusative must have gone through an ergative stage
>> sometime prior to that in its development.

>> For most transitive verbs, I believe the closest connection is between it
>> and its object so that, at some stage of development, an unmarked verb form
>> should represent a passive. To try to understand ergative constructions from
>> passive inflections developed in languages in accusative stages seems to me
>> to be potentially misleading.

R-S responds:

> You said twice that this is something which you *believe*, and this is OK
> with me, assuming that you are living in a community where you are free to
> believe whatever you choose to.
> But: this is of course without consequences for what we *know* about
> ergativity.

Pat comments:

Your confidence amazes me. To contrast my "belief" with your "knowledge" is
insufferably smug. There is not one thing which you "know" with which  some
other PhD has not differed at some time or some place. Unless you have
somehow found Mimir's Well, your belief that you "know" is roughly on a
footing with my belief (that I know).

R-S continued:

> First: as I think has been made clear several times here during this
> thread: there is no sense in the notion "ergative language", since
> ergativity is a phenomenon which may be present in some subsystems of a
> given language and absent in others, thus, while definitely showing this
> phenomenon to certain degrees, Georgian, Basque, Dyirbal and Thakali may be
> called "ergative languages", butt hey are in sometimes very different ways.
> What, in this respect, "going through an ergative stage" means is rather
> equivocal and requires special definitions, which seem to be lacking in
> your theory. "Ergative language" is a squishy notion.

Pat responds:

G. A. Klimov, which has your credentials, and who is rather highly regarded
in Russia, asserts an ergative stage for language, and I subscribe to his
interpretation.

After having writing this, I can, in good faith, still entertain the idea
that an "ergative stage" is really just a period in which ergative
characteristics predominate; pure phenomena are notoriously difficult to
capture under the microscope.

I have no problem asserting that an "ergative stage" existed in each of the
languages mentioned above at some time (in the sense described above), and
that, over time, each has modified that facts of the stage in different ways
and to different degrees.

R-S continued:

> Secondly: if we take every possible manifestation of ergativity into
> account, we know hosts of cases where (in one, some, most subsystems of a
> language) a) ACC > ERG and b) ERG > ACC, as well as both construction types
> remaining stable through the observable history of a language. Logically,
> from this follows nothing more that both types can precede the other, and
> nothing more. The alleged necessity for ACC to be preceded by ERG at any
> rate is just not contradicted by *this* fact, but that is all one can
> derive from this. That, however, your scenario is the less likely one is
> confirmed by some simple observations, namely that "ergative languages"
> (used with the qualifications mentioned above, and loosely meaning a
> language with a marked dominance of ergative constructions in various
> subsystems, among them the alignment of the basic constituents in an
> unmarked transitive sentence [note that even the superficially simple term
> "transitivity" needs some definition before we can use it with sense;
> however, instead of doing this here, I may refer you to Hopper/Thompson in
> Lg 1980]) are globally in the minority, that they further tend to cluster
> in specifiable regions (I know Basque is an exception, no need to remind
> me), iow. that it is a phenomenon tending to areal spread aso.  Furthermore,
> and what may be more significant, while we do know a great deal of
> languages without a single discernable trait of it, i.e. fully ACC
> languages, fully ERG languages don't seem to exist, i.e. all known
> languages with some ergativity display at least one subsystem which is
> organized on an ACC basis, the reverse not being observable (iow: there are
> only split-ergative languages, admittedly sometimes with less salient
> splits, but never without one). All this makes ergativity a  more *marked*
> construction type than accusativity. This does not rule out the possibility
> of languages, for which only full accusativity is observable throughout
> their attested or confidently reconstructable history may not have had a
> (more) ERG past nevertheless, but in the absence of conclusive and specific
> evidence for this (the precise nature of which can, of course, be
> discussed) there can be no automatic rule which would force us to assume
> this.

Pat responds:

Would you mind detailing the non-ERG features you know in Sumerian?

R-S further continued:

> Finally, as Larry Trask has pointed out before, the idea of stadiality  in
> language change has been safely laid to rest long ago, being nothing less
> than aprioristic ideology (if you like to stick to it nevertheless, you
> should be aware that you are in the fine company of, among others, N.Ja.
> Marr). It is no better confirmed than the notion that, e.g., feudalism
> precedes capitalism, which will yield to socialism eventually, or, back to
> linguistics, that all languages which display mostly pulmonic consonants,
> must have been preceded of necessity by stages which displayed a dominance
> of clicks in their systems.
> The idea of stadialism in language - which is of course a social
> institution - is philosophically on the same level as any other theory
> which tries to subject social institutions to inalterable laws of
> teleological development, like that of historical materialism.

Pat responds:

I continue to assert that complexity arises out of simplicity; and since I
have found that the relationship between the object and the verb is primary,
which loosely conforms to an ergative model of development, I would also
assert that, at least once, an "ergative stage" must precede any "accusative
stage" or a mixed system.

Pat

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