accusative and ergative languages

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Larry and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Monday, July 19, 1999 5:49 AM

> On Sat, 17 Jul 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>> As for the far-reaching conclusions of Dixon based on discourse
>> cohesion strategies, in my opinion they are flawed because these
>> strategies are purely conventional.

Larry responded:

> Not so.  Read on.

Pat responds:

I am going to defer a specific comment pending reading your answer to:
Schulze (" Language systems ARE conventional! This is one of the major
points of
 language tradition and L1 acquisition (despite of minimalism etc.)." in
another posting to this list.

Pat wrote:

>> In English, I can say: "John hit me, and he went away" or "I hit
>> John and he went away". What is the discourse cohesion strategy for
>> English?

Larry responded:

> You've overlooked the crucial null-subject cases:

> `John hit me and went away' *must* mean `John went away'.

> But `I hit John and went away' *must* mean `I went away'.

> Control of null NPs is one of the syntactic properties which crucially
> distinguish subjects from non-subjects in English and in some other
> languages.  And there is nothing "conventional" about it: this is a rule
> of English syntax.

Pat responds:

Another word for a "rule" is a "convention". Again, we appear to be chasing
our tails (definitions).

And the point that Leo makes in another posting deserves to be considered:

"Agreed -- and yet not quite agreed.  Are these really "subject
 properties"?  I freely acknowledge that that's what they're called, but
 for mainly
 for lack of any better name in normal linguistic terminology."

Larry continued:

> Let me change both NPs to third-person, to avoid any complications with
> agreement; suppose I say this:

> `John hit Bill and went away'.

> Now, in English, it is John who went away, not Bill.  However, according
> to my understanding of Dixon, if you say what looks like the literal
> equivalent of this in Dyirbal, it is *Bill* who went away, not John.
> This is one of the ways in which syntactic ergativity manifests itself
> in Dyirbal.

Pat answers:

Is it really that simple? Would we not be coming close to describing both
'nominative' and 'ergative' phenomena if we said that "a null-NP frequently
refers to the foregoing NP with which it agrees in case"?

 Larry continued:

> But not all ergative languages are the same here, and probably not even
> most.  If you translate this sentence as literally as possible into
> Basque, it is once again John who went away, and not Bill, just as in
> English.  This is so even though the ergative morphology of Basque is
> more thoroughgoing than that of Dyirbal, which is split.

> That is, Basque, like English, allows subjects to be coordinated with
> subjects, but not with non-subjects.  This is so even when one of the
> coordinated subject NPs is ergative and the other absolutive.  Basque
> does not allow the absolutive subject of an intransitive sentence to be
> coordinated with the absolutive object of a transitive sentence.

Pat responds:

First, as you know, I have questioned whether Dyirbal is, in fact, "split",
and have proposed a different explanation for the data.

Second, the point that Leo is making about distinguishing syntactic from
morphological subjects needs to be addressed by you in terms of "subject"
properties.

 Pat

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