accusative and ergative languages

[Nicholas Widdows]

<Fabrice Cavoto:>
maybe one could assume that if there once has been an ergative system in
IE, no matter how broad/exclusive it was at the very beginning, it was at
its latest stages restricted to the dichotomy 'animate vs. inanimate',
before it was totally lost.
</Fabrice Cavoto>

Has anyone given any evidence for ergativity in pre-IE yet? If they have I
missed it. I don't count direct object and intransitive subject being marked
the same, even if it is in inanimate nouns and therefore at the end of the
Silverstein hierarchy most likely to be ergative. What I want before calling
something ergative is transitive subjects marked differently from the same
word when intransitive.

Even if some ergative features can be identified, pure ergativity is very
rare. So anything that isn't pure accusative is likely to be sitting partway
along the hierarchy. But the presence of mixed type features doesn't imply
that the language is, or has been, diachronically changing type. It may just
be a (near-)universal.

Nicholas