accusative and ergative languages

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>> [Pat, 10 Jun 1999:]

>>> [...] 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.

> Jens asked:

>> Could you give us five examples of languages for which this sequence of
>> events is known with certainty? Should be easy if it applies to all.

> Pat answer[ed]:

> The best researched language family is Indo-European. IEists cannot agree if
> IE went through an ergative stage preceding its accusative stage so how can
> any reasonable person expect that five examples can be found that display
> the same proposed sequence "with certainty".

[...]

That's precisely what I feared: I don't mean to be hairsplitting or to
pick on anybody (forgive me if I have), the fact just is that I have
developed a highly sensitive suspicion to general guidelines being
insufficiently founded in relation to the data sets they are supposed to
guide us through. Anybody who has spent most of an active lifetime in a
scholarly linguistic environment being told that IE Studies ought to learn
from typology, or that we should consider general linguistic tendencies
more than we do, is fed up with warnings that the facts we find are not
credible because they are surprising.  Hell, if nothing is ever allowed to
be surprising there is no point in investigating it! Our methods must be
good enough to allow us to discover more than the selfevident. And I had
the suspicion that the widespread claim that the IE accusative structure
MUST proceed from an earlier ergative structure, contrary as it is to the
few cases I can control, just might be based on arguments and observations
less safe than the ones they are supposed to improve upon.  If you are
right in your assessment that Indo-European is the best-investigated data
field of them all, then perhaps typology and general linguistics should
rather bow their heads to _our_ supremacy than vice versa. Not that I'd
ever act so arrogantly, but it is a nice feeling to just imagine that for
a change.

Jens