accusative and ergative languages

[Nik Taylor]

Larry Trask wrote:

> Not much of an answer, I'm afraid.  The "passive" interpretation of
> ergativity was based squarely on morphology, with no attention to syntax
> -- even though a passive is a syntactic form.  More particularly, it was
> based on the confused and erroneous notion that a grammatical subject
> must always stand in the same case.

To look at it another way, had Europeans spoken ergative languages, they
might've analyzed accusativity as "antipassive".

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