Fw: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

-----Original Message-----
From: rfrank <rfrank at uva.es>
To: edsel at glo.be <edsel at glo.be>
Date: Friday, June 04, 1999 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

>Hi Ed,
>Could you forward this to the IE-list?
>Talk to you soon.
>Thanks
>R.

>petegray escribió:

>> Wolfgang wrote a full reply to my suggestion of three places where IE might
>> have been ergative.  I appreciated the comments about the variation over
>> time, and about the fact that languages are almost never purely ergative or
>> accusative.  I am responding to one point in particular.  On the identity of
>> nominative and accusative for all neuters, he said:

>>> The only thing we can conclude from this is that true neuters rarely show
>>> up as agents (that they hardly ever played the role of a subjective (S) or
>>> agentive (A) except in a metaphorical sense). Neutral NPs hence are very
>>> likely to represents objectives (O).  This is very natural - it tells us
>>> nothing about [where IE lies on a continuum of ergativitiy and
>>> accusativity]

>> [Peter] Perhaps I fail to understand.  Did you mean to count both subjective
>> and agentive as "agents", and say that it was natural that inanimates should
>> not play that role?  If pre-IE had an animate / inanimate distinction, we
>> can believe that inanimates might never or very rarely be agents, but it is
>> more difficult to believe they were never subjects.

>[snip]

> [Roz] Without going into a prolonged discussion of the comments above, I
> would state that based on my knowledge of a historically attested ergative
> language, namely, Euskera (Basque), the statements above entail several
> assumptions or premises which may not be appicable to the case at hand, i.e.,
> to reconstructing the *ergative stage(s) of PIE.

> 1) First, the comments assume that the ergative stage in question or perhaps
> better stated, the ergative languages that preceeded and/or contributed the
> hypothetical ergative feature(s) to PIE, had such an animate/inanimate
> division (and/or tripartite division with the neuter) and further that as
> such the conceptual or cognitive frame governing or defining the
> animate/inanimate division was essentially identical to the one that is
> employed by IE speakers today. That is an assumption.

> 2) Then there is the assumption that animacy is somehow a requirement for
> agency.

> 3) And further that the only recourse that an ergative language has/might
> have for marking the notion of agency is by means of the ergative.

> If applied to the case of Euskera all three of these assumptions would be
> false.

>Best wishes,
>Roz Frank