Talk:Split ergativity

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[edit] Marking-based split

I'm not sure if this is properly speaking a split.

"The type of marking involved. Some languages (including various Austronesian languages of New Guinea, such as Sinaugoro) exhibit an ergative-absolutive pattern with respect to case marking, but a nominative-accusative pattern with respect to agreement."

I believe this is in fact another distinction. In many ergative languages, the verb arguments are marked with erg or abs case as expected but transitive verbs always agree with the subject (that is, intransitive verbs agree with the absolutive argument, but transitive verbs agree with the ergative argument), and word order follows suit, for example noun-ABS intransitive_verb but noun-ERG transitive_verb noun-ABS). Such languages are commonly termed "morphologically ergative but syntactically accusative", and they're not considered a canonical example of split ergativity. IIRC in fact most ergative languages are syntactically accusative. If I'm not making sense, please tell me, but I think this marking-based split is different from the others because it's not orthogonal to morphosyntax. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 01:55, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Animacy hierarchy

It occurs to me that the section about "discourse participants" doesn't properly represent the effect the animacy hierarchy has on the type of split systems exampled by it. Not all splits conditioned by participant animacy are divided between "first and second person pronouns" and "other". Cevlakohn