[Lingtyp] languages with accusative/ergative alternation

Mon Jul 1 19:59:50 UTC 2024

Dear Martin,

I fully agree with Matthew’s remark. This is precisely the position I defend explicitly in my forthcoming book on ‘Transitivity, valency and voice’. The only thing that matters is that, TAKEN TOGETHER, the patterns analyzed as transitive because none of them shows evidence of detransitivization are dominant. This is the only way to deal consistently not only with so-called symmetrical voice systems, but also with systems involving differential coding of A or P.

If you accept this idea, BINARY symmetrical voice systems such as that of Balinese as analyzed in Arka’s works (but NOT the Philipinne-type systems of symmetrical voices) illustrate what you are looking for, since in Balinese, the agent voice construction and the patient voice construction equally qualify as transitive, and the alignment with intransitive verbal predication is S = A in the agent voice, and S = P in the  patient voice.

Best, 

Denis

De : Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] De la part de Matthew Dryer via Lingtyp
Envoyé : lundi 1 juillet 2024 19:01
À : Martin Haspelmath; LINGTYP LINGTYP
Objet : Re: [Lingtyp] languages with accusative/ergative alternation

Martin,

I don’t understand why you say “by definition, a transitive pattern is a dominant one (occurring in more than two thirds of the cases)”. Why can there not be two transitive patterns, neither of which is dominant?

Matthew

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Martin Haspelmath via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Monday, July 1, 2024 at 2:00 AM
To: LINGTYP LINGTYP <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] languages with accusative/ergative alternation

Thanks for the comments on my query!

I was thinking of a contrast between (i) ALTERNATIONS and (ii) SPLITS, where an alternation is a pair of related patterns with overlapping distributions, while a split is a set of patterns that complement each other. Thus, the TAM splits in languages like Pitta-Pitta (Peter Austin) and Kopar (Bill Foley) do not count here.

Misha Daniel is right that it is not clear how to even identify "accusative/ergative alternations", and for this reason I had asked about languages which have been "described as exhibiting" such an alternation.

It seems to me that one needs to specify that by definition, a transitive pattern is a dominant one (occurring in more than two thirds of the cases), so that if there are two competing patterns none of which is dominant, one cannot identify a transitive pattern – and as a result, there is no way to identify "accusative" or "ergative". A well-known case of a language with no dominant agent-patient pattern (and hence no transitivity) is Tagalog.

(This is different for ditransitive constructions, which need not be dominant in this sense, because the comparison is with monotransitive P, aas Misha notes.)

Jürgen Bohnemeyer's example from Hindi-Urdu seems more like an alternation between two ergative patterns (one in which the ergative is "instrumental"), but it also illustrates the difficulty of matching language-particular phenomena with comparative concepts if the latter are not very clearly defined.

Best,

Martin

On 30.06.24 16:07, Michael Daniel wrote:

Martin, 

I am not sure how to operationalize the notions of accusative and ergative in this context. Assuming one uses the standard procedure of comparing the bivalent pattern to the intransitive one, I guess some unmarked antipassive constructions would qualify. Thus, in Mehweb Dargwa, East Caucasian, which lacks regular antipassive derivation, the verb 'carry' has two alternative valencies:

Agent-Erg carries Theme-Nom (ergative pattern on the basis of comparison with X goes)

Agent-Nom carries Theme-Erg (accusative pattern on the bases of comparison with X goes)

But, on the basis of comparison with other transitive verbs, the second pattern is intransitive, so this would not qualify as accusative in the usual sense. Yet, I do not clearly see what would be possible other grounds to identify an ergative / accusative alternation, even in the presence of a TAM or animacy based split, because in your requirement these variables should be controlled for. 

This is different from the situation of secundative / indirective alternation, which is possible to identify in a language because they are identified on alignment-independent grounds (comparison to the encoding of P). Maybe I am missing something, but I do not see how this is done in the case of the putative ergative / accusative uncoded alternation.    

Misha

вс, 30 июн. 2024 г. в 14:48, Peter Austin via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>:

Assuming you do not mean TAM-based split ergativity, e.g. Pitta-Pitta.

Best

Peter

  _____  

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Martin Haspelmath via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2024 1:41:54 PM
To: LINGTYP LINGTYP <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Subject: [Lingtyp] languages with accusative/ergative alternation 

Dear typologists,

Does anyone know of a language that has been described as exhibiting an 
accusative/ergative alternation, i.e. where verbs with meanings like 
'break' or 'chase' can occur in two constructions such as (1) and (2) 
(which are schematic examples, not English)?

(1) the dog-NOM chased the cat-ACC

(2) the dog-ERG chased the cat-NOM

Such an alternation would be analogous to indirective/secundative 
alternations, as in the schematic examples (3) and (4).

(3) they provided food-ACC us-DAT ('they provided food to us')

(4) they provided us-ACC food-INS ('they provided us with food')

While indirective/secundative alternations have been described 
repeatedly, accusative/ergative alternations are little-known, and seem 
to be quite rare. Is this impression correct?

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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