ablative as ergative marker

[Paul J Hopper]

Excerpts from mail: 21-Oct-98 Re: ablative as ergative ma.. by
Ralf-Stefan Georg at HOME.I


Rolf-Stefan Georg's recent contribution ends by making an association
between agent-marking and viewpoint; he wonders if it's been discussed
before. Sure it has - by Scott DeLancey, "Aspect, Transitivity, and
Viewpoint" in Tense-Aspect: Between Semantics and Pragmatics, ed.
Hopper, 1982 167-184 (Typological Studies in Language, vol. 1)

Paul Hopper


> It may be interesting to collect ERG-ABL-syncretisms (if it has not - as so
> often - been done already ;-). If there's more to it, the
> grammaticalisation of something like "viewpoint" might emerge as just
> another source of ergative marking (but these are as yet only unripe ideas).
> Ralf-Stefan Georg