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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: VOS languages
In-Reply-To: Johannes Heinecke's message of 27 Feb 1996 10:16:14 GMT
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In article <4gulle$78d@news.cs.tu-berlin.de> Johannes Heinecke
<johannes@compling.hu-berlin.de> writes:

>May be something of a nasty remark, but before you can deal with typological
>questions on word order you should define what is denoted by terms like
>`subject' and `object'. I know there've a lot of articles been written on that
>issue, but this doesn't make it easier. Especially with ergative languages
>these terms may soon become inadequate (cf. Basque)

You must make a distinction between *morphological* ergativity and *syntactic*
ergativity.  Basque, like modern Georgian, another unrelated example, has
*morphological* ergative marking, but is syntactically accusative.  So for
those two languages, the standard definitions work very well.

I'm not convinced that they don't work for syntactically ergative languages.
-- 
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_
