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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Ergative versus accusative [was Re: Inflected versus agglutinative languages]
In-Reply-To: Stuart Robinson's message of Wed, 08 Jan 1997 17:13:24 -0800
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Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 18:27:58 GMT
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In article <32D44634.40AC@ohsu.edu> Stuart Robinson <robinstu@ohsu.edu> writes:

>Note, however, that there are five logically possible groupings:

>1.  S and A treated on way, O treated another--call this accusative
>2.  S and O treated one way, A treated another--call this ergative
>3.  A and O treated one way, S treated another
>4.  S, A, O all treated differently--call this a tripartite distinction
>5.  S, A, and O all treated the same--call this neutral

>The most common pattern is probably (1), although to my knowledge no one
>really knows exactly what the relative distributions look like.

Although I have a number of reservations about her conclusions (and initial
biases) on the historical side, the raw data on this question in Nichols'
_Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time_ appears to me to answer this question
adequately: Accusative marking is relatively more prevalent than all other
types.

I don't recall any examples of your third type in her data; on the other hand,
the stative-active type doesn't seem to appear in your table:  Animate A or S
is marked differently than either animate or inanimate O, and inanimate S is
marked the same as inanimate O, and there are lexical verbs which take only an
animate or only an inanimate S.  (The earliest layer reconstructible in Proto-
Indo-European appears to be stative-active; cf. Lehmann, _Theoretical Bases of
Indo-European Linguistics_.)
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
