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Retiree? Standee? These examples seem a little convoluted - I've never heard or seen them. What about attendee? This, in comparison, is quite common. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.232.23.97 ( talk) 15:47, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
Hi. Hmm. Needs info about syntactic ergativity? And perhaps expansion & more example? - Ish ishwar 05:24, 2005 Jan 6 (UTC)
Can this be considered a consequence of the fact that in Latin the past participle is passive? I remember there were some cases in Lating where the past participle was used in an active meaning. So it seems the -ee form can express two different meanings: passive and/or completion. — Sebastian ( T) 19:21, 2005 Apr 24 (UTC)
I am only an armchair linguist. But it seems like the behavior of many English verbs, which can be either transitive or intransitive, exhibit something that we might call a "trace of ergativity." These verbs, when transitive, are of the form s-intrans -- verb -- object, but when one noun element is deleted, they are intransitive verbs with a syntax form s-intrans -- verb, where the intransitive subject is the same as the object of the transitive verb. For example:
"I grow flowers" vs. "The flowers are growing."
"I hung a painting on my living room wall" vs. "A painting hangs on my living room wall."
"These changes improve my opinion of this painting" vs. "My opinion of this painting improves with age."
"I showed the apartment to the potential tenant" vs. "This apartment shows very well."
I could list a lot of other examples, but you get the picture. When one noun is deleted from a transitive sentence, with these kinds of verbs, an intransitive sentence is created where the former object of the transitive verb is the subject of the intransitive verb. Is this not a "trace of Ergativy" in English?
EDIT: I added a sentence referencing the article on ergative verbs.
Kdogg36 23:54, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
This has absolutely nothing to do with traces of ergativity. This is simply ambitransitivity -that is, verbs with dual transitivity possibility. You need to be careful in this matter because what you're talking about is a semantic difference which is not a syntactic difference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.198.68.218 ( talk) 23:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
It seems to me that people speaking accusative languages loves to "find" ergative traces in their own language. It is, however, nothing but an oversimplification of the situation.
That fact that "grow" in "I grow flowers" vs. "The flowers are growing" behaves the way it does, does not make it all right to argue the ergativity case because if you replace the "flowers" with their respective pronouns you get "I grow them" vs. "They grow". Here you can clearly see that the intransitive subject and the transitive object are not treated alike as should be the case, if it were a matter of ergativity.
Thus, this is a semantic difference in the verb "grow", not a syntactic evidence/trace of ergativity.
esegel 0:23, 23 January 2008
Isn't escape ditransitive? As in The man escaped the prison. Thus it seems to be a poor example, perhaps even invalidating the claim. Then again, I'm no expert. Zophar ( talk) 07:03, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, causatives, indeed. Causatives are often cited as ergatives, and that's simply wrong. The reason, I think, as I wrote above, is because ergativity is an interesting phenomenon for us accusative-speaking people, and we thus like to find traces of it in our own languages. These instances, however, are not genuine instances of ergativity.
To Zophar1. As you know I don't like the ergativity analysis advocated by many, so of course I don't like th "escape" example either. "Escape" in "John escaped" could just as easily be argued to be a trasitive verb with the object omitted, just as "I eat" is transitive even though the actual eaten object has been omitted, as it often is. Regardless, I still don't think that the examples constitute ergativity.
esegel —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.82.170.214 ( talk) 11:19, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
The following raises a question:
Based on what little I know of Georgian, this is not an irregularity, and it is probably not explained by a former direct object now gone, and it is also not split ergativity, but instead it's simply an active-stative paradigm. I'd like to see what other intransitive verbs behave like this.
I found this very useful paper... Active languages, by Daniel Andréasson, and in the Georgian section it says that:
Now, how do we get all that into the article?
-- Pablo D. Flores 10:50, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing out the article; I am going to work on expanding this article after I read the relevant sections. Though I have to say that, the theory of "former object having gone" is not something that is just made up to explain the ergative behavior of verbs such as sneeze. I have discussed this with two people who are native Georgian speakers and teach Georgian, and that is how they have explained it to me. This is also not an irregularity, either (I did not notice; when I wrote the explanation of "sneeze", I did not intend to explain this as an irregularity, is that how it sounds like?)
Some other intransitive verbs that behave like sneeze are (I am just going to list a few that comes to my mind right now):
Cough, stroll, jump, swim, roll, cry, dance,... (basically many class 3 verbs who just behave like class 1,(transitive verbs), so there are many intransitive verbs that use the ergative case in the aorist screeve, again, which is not an irregularity (I am assuming, you know the verb classes in Georgian(?)).
Then why don't you write what you wish, and I will double check it for you. Although I am not native speaker of Georgian, I have been studying it for a while, and definitely can be helpful.
The analysis of Tagalog as ergative-absolutive is not accepted unanimously. I've seen Tagalog analyzed as a trigger language, leaving the matter of nom-vs-erg completely aside; and as far as I've been able to research, the language does not fit well in any of the known paradigms. This is the conclusion to an online paper about topicalization in Tagalog:
Another reference:
If anything can be turned into a "subject" in Tagalog using voice operations, and no voice is more marked than the others, then it's a moot point to discuss ergativity vs accusativity. At best one should describe Tagalog's morphosyntactic alignment as mixed ergative-absolutive (but that doesn't say much). The first paper I mentioned says Tagalog is syntactically ergative but has some properties of accusative languages (wh-extraction and raising follow the "nominative" argument), and morphologically it is symmetric as to what can be turned into a subject (there's no true passive or antipassive voice).
-- Pablo D. Flores 28 June 2005 11:16 (UTC)
Nepali has an ergative/instrumental construction by adding -le after a noun. It can be used ergatively with a subject: "Ram-le dunga halyo." meaning "Ram threw the stone." It can also be used instrumentally with an object: "Ma ama-le pakayeko bhat kaye.", meaning "I ate the rice cooked by my mother." Apparently there are parallel constructs in other north indian IE languages.
I am attempting to get a better grip on the exact function/import of ergativity, but this article is too complex for me to dig through. This is my fourth attempt (in over a month) at trying to figure out what the heck it means through this one Wikipedia article. Isn't there some simpler way to state its definition than "An ergative-absolutive language is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs"? I understand what every word of that sentence means. But it is at once thoroughly confusing and also unable to convey the deeper meaning of ergativity. I think it needs some work.
Furthermore, the representation of the ergative vs. accusative section does nothing to elucidate my confusion. I still understand what object/subject/agent mean. But what does the chart represent? Is it saying that the nominative forms of the object are different from those of the accusative in N-A languages? And still, what does it mean? There should be some more thorough examples included in this specific chart. It wouldn't be hard. Just enough to show someone like me what constitutes "different" or "same" once you have made those declarations.
Mind you, I understand a lot about comparative linguistics - though mostly through my own observations and experience - and I am still struggling with the meaning of ergativity, or rather ergativity in contrast with other modes of linguistic expression. Understand very well what transitivity means (i.e. the reason we say "John and I went to the store" instead of "John and me..."). But if someone of my patience and background has trouble understanding the article, doesn't it concern anyone here that other readers/users might have the same troubles? -z42
I understand exactly why -z42 wrote what they wrote and it would be rather pushing it to advise, as Ruakh does, that someone as confused as -z42 admits to being about what ergativity is should suggest how to clarify the concept of ergativity on Wikipedia. Having just read the article for the first time, I must say that it didn't start well for me either. The first sentence may be a good wide-ranging definition but it is far too general for people like -z42 and me to make much sense of on a first read-through. What does it mean to "treat distinctly from"? The question arises in my mind, "in every respect, only in certain respects or merely in respect to morphology?" Dixon's wording, "treated in the same way", leaves the lay person none the wiser from the start but least he swiftly moves on to indicate that it was through the ergative case that such a phenomenon became a concern in linguistics. Notably this Wikipedia article deals primarily with matters of case in order to explicate the feature; would it therefore not be helpful to define ergativity by anchoring the opening definition within the example of cases as the most direct way of informing the lay linguist? Or is Wikipedia merely to be here for buffs? As this is English wikipedia, one can also validly use contrast with English grammar in order to convey the concept. Perhaps a good opening for the lay reader might read like the following.
""An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the patient of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. The feature is sometimes found in syntax but is chiefly observable in the morphology of nouns, ie, in an ergative-absolutive language, one might say, as it were, "HE loves HIM" but one would also say "HIM cares" instead of "HE cares".
Nominative-accusative languages such as English use one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the agent of an transitive verb but another case for the object, eg, "HE cares" (intransitive) and "HE loves him" (transitive). Ergative-absolutive languages work differently by using one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb but another case for the agent, eg, as it were, "HIM cares" (intransitive) and "He loves HIM" (transitive). In this context, HE would be the ergative case and HIM the absolutive case.""
I propose that these simple examples in English are a very immediate way of demonstrating this linguistic feature in terms of case and would be best placed right at the head of the article. The pictures would more usefully come in later as a secondary method of signifying the pattern for the reader's mind once they have already anchored their thinking in example sentences.
I also suggest either removing the word 'subject' and replacing it with the terms 'agent' and 'patient' or removing the words 'agent' and 'subject' and replacing them with the terms 'subject of transitive verb' and 'subject of intransitive verb'. Using the word 'agent' here without the complementary expression of 'patient' and in conjunction with the word 'subject' as terminology to cover both ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative languages seems inconsistent. If the article is going to use the word 'subject' in relation to nominative-accusative language, it is perhaps inadvisable to create the impression for any length of time during reading that an 'agent' is different from a 'subject'. Likewise, either ergative-absolutive grammar has subjects or it doesn't, of course, and if the article is going to use a grammatical term from nominative-accusative grammar such as 'agent' INSTEAD of the word subject, it should also use the term 'patient' instead of the word subject. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.225.35 ( talk) 10:48, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
The article is not very clear. I think it would be best to start with Basq example sentences to explain the concept. Inasmuch as classical grammar terms were developed from non-ergative languages they should be used only with great cautions. For example, would transitive/intransitive have the same connotations for a Basq native speaker ? Even the term Subject-Object may need a refinement. For example, I would regard Ergativity as a bidirectional relationship A-B (A changes B but B also changes A) as opposed to a unidirectional one. Rather than entering into lengthy discussions into different degrees of ergavitity it would seem much better to simply add a table with ergative languages. Additional criteria (split/nonsplit) can then be added in one or more special columns. The restriction of ergativity to subsets can easily be refined that way (e.g. "aorist only)". Sumerian and Berber Languages should also be present with example sentences. It might be interesting to give some statistical data. For example: How many agglutinating languages (%) are ergative how many are not ? How many ergative languages are tonal / pitched ? It should be mentioned that Kurdish has some ergativity although it is considered to be Indoeuropean. Geographical distribution might be interesting. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mdenk ( talk • contribs) 17:02, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure one can take a Japanese sentence like that and say "in contrast" it is nominative-accusative - if one could perhaps supply another Japanese sentence that is equivalent. What is the relation of -a to -ak in Basque? For example.. I could argue that -ak might be equivalent to the marker of the passive agent "-ni" in Japanese... and make a slight alteration to the verb... then perhaps one could argue that Japanese is in this case also ergative, since the changes between the two sample sentences are equal. and since Japanese marks the absolutive case (-ga) on both the man in the first and the boy in the second - like Basque.
Ergative language | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sentence: | Otoko ga tsuita. | Otoko ni kodomo ga mirareta. | ||||
Words: | otoko ga | tsuita | otoko ni | kodomo ga | mirareta | |
Gloss: | man ABS | arrived | man ERG | child ABS | saw | |
Function: | S | VERBintrans | A | O | VERBtrans | |
Translation: | "The man arrived." | "The man saw the child." |
Although I learned to translate the second sentence as the passive, "The boy was seen by the man". Zorgster ( talk) 02:02, 6 August 2013 (UTC) Ergativity is a fairly simple concept. The explanation with the SOP diagram takes something simple and succeeds in making it almost incomprehensible. Please, someone redo that section. I would if I knew how. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8C3:4201:BFC6:CAB:7C81:A42B:EA9B ( talk) 15:57, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
In the Split ergativity section, two lines of devanagari Hindi are given, with what I assume is their Latin transliteration below them. But what are the phrases in the boxes; i.e. "Kur pirtûkekê dikire" and "Kurî pirtûkek kirî"? (ps thats is in kurdish/kurmanji " The boy is buying a book" and "The boy bought a book". This is confusing. 198.150.76.150 13:07, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I, too, find this article unnecessarily obtuse. I'm not a linguist, just someone interested in languages. However, might it not be more informative to provide examples of ergativity (and accusitivity) from the standpoint of ENGLISH than obscure foreign languages? Since it's obvious that anyone on this page understands English, wouldn't it make the most sense to provide a framework for a concept based on a common foundation?
The only part of the article I truly understand is the '-ee' example. Since 'ergativity' must derive from the term for 'work' or 'doer' the concept must have something to do with marking who is doing what.
On the other hand, it would be also helpful if citations were used to provide further help. The accusative example from what little I know appears to be Japanese, it might be helpful to note that for others who might want to track down Japanese linguistic traits.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.125.95.49 ( talk • contribs) .
I suggest that the use of examples of English pronouns in order to demonstrate how English does NOT work shows very clearly to the English speaker how differently to English ergative-absolutive languages DO work. The didactic principle here is contrast, specifically between the morphology of nominative and accusative cases and in relation to agent, patient and object and transitive/intransitive verbs. The use of examples such as "HIM cares" and "HE loves him" etc can and do indicate this. One can then proceed to concrete examples in ergative-absolutive languages to show the precise morphological application in grammatical context in the pertinent languages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.225.35 ( talk) 11:16, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Can someone please explain the sentence:
'I was given a book'
I wasn't given at all, the book was given. In Latin, Russian, German etc 'I' in this sentence would be in the dative case. Why don't we say in English:
'Me was given a book'?
Any ideas? Does this have anything to do with ergativity?
TAF
Note that that article needs help, if anyone here is buff on this term. MaxEnt ( talk) 19:44, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
The following was in the article: ", and P is indeed more appropriate than is O, because O is biased towards accusative languages. Analogically, it is also defined as Agent of transitive verb below, not as subject. If accusative and ergative languages are to be compared, we need a non-biased terminology, completely omitting subject/object)"
Please refrain from stating what "we" need to do within the actual text of the article, as it is unencyclopedic.-- Jeffro77 ( talk) 15:41, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Here is the example of hypothetical ergative English from the text:
I (S) traveled; She (S) traveled. Me (A) invited she (O) to go with me; Her (A) invited I (O) to go with her.
I speak a split-ergative language myself, and this seems wrong somehow. I'm no linguist, but it seems to me that what we're saying is this:
Me (S) sleep; Her (S) sleeps. (travel doesn't give ergative in my language) I (A) invited her (O) to go with me; She (A) invited me (O) to go with her.
The (S) in the intransitive sentence "feels" more like an object, and the (A) and (O) in the transitive seems reversed. Perhaps it's just my imagination, but could someone with a bit more linguistic knowledge check this, please? -- 88.90.165.48 ( talk) 21:23, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
This page is nearly unreadable without checking the stupid terminology used here.
67.194.132.91 ( talk) 00:58, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Jimzip ( talk) 03:48, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
It seems to me that there is a trace of, or shall we say something analogous to, ergativity in English past/passive participles used as adjectives. Specifically, when the participle of a transitive verb is used as an adjective, its noun is the patient -- the recipient of the action -- and the object of the sentence using the active verb :
But when the participle of an intransitive verb is used as an adjective, its noun is also the patient, even though in this case it is the subject of the sentence that uses the active verb:
If this is right, there must be a reference for it, and it could go in the article as something that an English-only speaker might be able to relate to easily. Duoduoduo ( talk) 21:11, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
This article gets off to a bad start by being ferociously difficult even in its most basic explanation. The first couple of sentences before the baffling diagram might be just about all right, but the part that "explains" the diagram is horrendous. Suddenly the terms "argument" and "core argument" are plucked from thin air and become part of the "explanation". This is an article that can only inform those who already know a lot about the subject, i.e. it is pretty pointless. Wikipedia articles need to be understandable to the general, moderately educated, reader. I cannot really understand it, and I write as someone who studied languages, including linguistics, at a famous old university. Judging by the response to a previous user who complained about this problem, those who are in the know may not have been very sympathetic up to now. Can someone fix it? 08:44, 15 January 2012 (UTC)~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pawebster ( talk • contribs)
The morpheme {-a} does not mark the absolutive is a mark of grammatical number, the absolutive in Euskera is marked with ∅, and the ergative with-k, please clarify this.
Reference in Spanish: http://jmacosta.galeon.com/sketch.htm
I'm Lingüistic Student of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, thanks for your attention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.26.12.229 ( talk) 10:36, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I eat bread:
Min nan xwar. Ez nên (nanî) dixwim.
Min nan werd Ez nanî wena -- Alsace38 ( talk) 12:16, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, I tried to make it easier for English speakers to understand (for instance, replacing early instances of "argument" with "subject", since in English, the argument of an intransitive sentence IS the subject [and it took me 2 hours of MSPaint diagrams to figure that out]), but may have sacrificed complete accuracy in the proccess. The header certainly needed work; you had to look up "argument", and within that page, "predicate", and still didn't understand what you were reading, so I made the changes listed. I also defined the terms "intransitive", "transitive", "agent", and "patient" in the article itself for clarity, so that you won't have to have 5 or 6 tabs open.
I also reversed the "vs" part, just for continuity (so that the whole "A/S/O" thing would flow from the "ergativity" part), but that was just for aesthetics. If it's unsatisfactory, those were all I changed, so just revert my first edit (friggin' coding errors!).
In other words, I tried. :P
Edit: I have no idea what's wrong with the diagrams. I don't remember touching that part... 74.177.127.125 ( talk) 04:03, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Could we add an example to the lead, pointing out as we're making it that it's not exact? Such as: "As a rough, but not completely adequate, example, English pronouns align in an nominative-accusative way:
Here the subjective (nominative) forms "I/he" are the most basic, and the "me/him" objective (accusative) forms are different. An ergative-absolutive language might instead have:
Here the absolutive forms "me/him" are the most basic, and the "I/he" ergative forms are different. Ergativity can be expressed in other ways as well, such as which part a verb agrees with when conjugated." I'm also wondering if a crash-course in subject/object vs. agent/patient, probably using English passive voice to illustrate, would be genuinely helpful, or just further confusing and un-encyclopedic. Lsfreak ( talk) 05:04, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
I couldn't follow the text in the original article (and I'm not a total linguistic incompetent)
An ip editor ( 86.156.225.35 ) wrote this text above -
for the lay reader
""An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the patient of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. The feature is sometimes found in syntax but is chiefly observable in the morphology of nouns, ie, in an ergative-absolutive language, one might say, as it were, "HE loves HIM" but one would also say "HIM cares" instead of "HE cares".
Nominative-accusative languages such as English use one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the agent of an transitive verb but another case for the object, eg, "HE cares" (intransitive) and "HE loves him" (transitive). Ergative-absolutive languages work differently by using one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb but another case for the agent, eg, as it were, "HIM cares" (intransitive) and "He loves HIM" (transitive). In this context, HE would be the ergative case and HIM the absolutive case.""
I am quite inclined to insert that chunk of text into the article just after the following lines:
These different arguments are usually symbolized as follows:
O = object of transitive verb (also symbolized as P for "patient") S = core argument of intransitive verb A = agent of transitive verb
(here)
If the examples in that quote are correct then I think I now understand what is meant by ergative-absolute language where the article itself was unclear. I don't know how watched this page is, but if I don't see any feedback in the next week I'll go ahead with that change. I'm still not 100% sure what the quote means by the words 'in this context' so expanding on that would be good. Cheers EdwardLane ( talk) 08:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps a sentence diagram could help in comparing this type of language with English. I think we can all agree that the terminology is not easily understood by someone who hasn't otherwise studied the distinction between the language types. Fortunately, a sentence diagram might help communicate what terms mean and how to parse and write in languages other than what we're familiar with. Just because this isn't a "simple English" article doesn't mean that the typical reader of English should decidedly not understand it. Also or alternatively, an article covering the various types of languages should cover some distinctions with a sentence diagram. If there is already such an article, it might help to include an obvious link to that. (I, for one, haven't noticed it if it exists.) -- D. F. Schmidt ( talk) 15:08, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
"The Zazaki, Gorani, Sorani, and Kurmanji are the only ergative languages of the Iranian language family."
But isn't Pashto also an Iranian language (Eastern Iranian, to be exact) which is known to exhibit "split ergativity"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:304:CC94:6AC0:112:44D9:610D:C7AE ( talk) 05:39, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
For instance, instead of saying "she moved" and "I moved her", speakers of an ergative language would say the equivalent of "her moved" and "I moved her".
This is one way of looking at it, but not the only way. You could equally well say:
instead of saying "she moved" and "I moved her", speakers of an ergative language would say the equivalent of "she moved" and "by me she moved".
Indeed this is the most obvious way of looking at languages such as Hindi (see Split ergativity) where you have sentences such as laṛke-ne kitāb xarīdī, which might be glossed as 'by boy book (was) bought' (the verb xarīdī here is a feminine participle, agreeing with kitāb 'book'); similarly in Basque (see Basque language) we are told that some verbs are loan-words derived from Latin passive participles ending in -tus, implying that the Basque-speakers who borrowed those participles felt they were the equivalent of verbs in their own language. So I think this formulation in the introduction is possibly rather misleading. It would be better if it were removed. Kanjuzi ( talk) 04:37, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
I can't see why the title 'Ergative–absolutive language' has a dash in it rather than a hyphen. This punctuation seems to me rather bizarre. But in any case surely the article would be better titled 'Ergative language'; since if you look up the two phrases on Google ngrams ergative language vs. ergative-absolutive language you will see that the phrase 'ergative language' is much more commonly used, in fact it is over 100 times more common. I propose therefore that it should be changed.
Another thing about this article, however, is that it deals only with ergative-absolutive languages and nominative-accusative languages, without mentioning except in one brief sentence that there are also tripartite languages in which all three participants (agent, object, and subject) are in a different case. The reader has to get quite a long way down the article before he or she comes across that sentence. Would it not be less confusing if the two articles 'Ergative-absolutive language' and 'Tripartite language' were merged? It would surely be much better if that rather useful SOA diagram near the beginning of the article were in three parts, one for each of the three possibilities. Kanjuzi ( talk) 05:04, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
"Note that the word subject, as it is typically defined in grammars of nominative–accusative languages, is inapplicable when referring to ergative–absolutive languages, or when discussing morphosyntactic alignment in general."
There seems to be some potential for confusion here, first since the abbreviation 'S' for the 'core argument' of an intransitive verb implies that it is an abbreviation of the word 'subject', but also the writer goes on to refer to ergative languages as being 'SVO' etc. And of course, if it is not appropriate to use the word 'subject' when speaking of ergative languages, it must be equally inappropriate to use the word 'object' of the equivalent in an ergative language of a sentence such as 'John broke the window' (especially as, as I pointed out above, such a sentence could be equally well be glossed as 'By John the window (was) broken' or 'Because of John the window broke'; looked at from this point of view the word 'window' would be the equivalent of the subject, not the object). The words 'subject', 'agent', and 'patient' might be better, providing that it is made clear that 'subject' refers to sentences with intransitive verbs only. Again, I would urge the introduction to be rewritten making it clear that there are three participants, S, A, O, and that in Nominative-accusative languages S and A are treated the same, in Ergative-absolutive languages A and O are treated the same, while in tripartite languages all three are treated differently. Kanjuzi ( talk) 05:39, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
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The alleged third type, "Ergative-accusative", is defined as having ergative-absolutive alignment for nouns and nominative-accusative alignment for pronouns, but the phrase links to the article about tripartite languages, and those are defined in a completely different way, namely as languages that mark the ergative, absolutive and accusative participant in three different ways. I would say that this "third type" with a split between nouns and pronouns is a case of what would normally be called split ergativity, not "ergative-accusative alignment" or "tripartite alignment". -- 94.155.68.202 ( talk) 01:26, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
There is a move discussion in progress on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Linguistics which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. — RMCD bot 17:30, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
There is, in my opinion, too much jargon in the intro for it to be of any use to most readers ( WP:TECHNICAL). If it could be made more accessible (for example by explaining terms), that would be ideal. – Thjarkur (talk) 15:50, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
"Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that—on top of being ergative morphologically—also show ergativity in syntax."
The phrasing here is unclear in terms of whether languages merely need to show some morphological/syntactical ergativity or be fully ergative in either aspect.
"No language has been recorded in which both the morphological and syntactical ergative are present."
This suggests that languages need in fact be a) fully ergative in morphology, but not at all in syntax (Group 1) or b) fully ergative in both morphology and syntax (Group 2). Hence, Group 2 is empty? But then we get the following sentence:
"Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter."
Alright, so Group 2 isn't empty and what the previous sentence really should have said is "No language has been recorded that is fully ergative in both morphology and syntax." This would then also make more sense with the next sentence, which actually gives an example of a language that shows both forms of ergativity, ergo would fall into Group 2, one would think. So Group 2's inclusion criteria should be "at least partially ergative in both morphology and syntax". And so I assume the same goes for Group 1, which should then be "at least partially ergative in morphology, but not at all in syntax."
"Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet it displays accusative alignment with certain pronouns."
So Dyirbal is fully ergative in terms of syntax, but only partially in terms of morphology, hence a Group 2 language, no? In fact, is it the ONLY Group 2 language, as no other languages show at least partial syntactic ergativity per the preceding sentence?
Suggested rephrasing:
If Dyirbal is actually the only language in Group 2:
"Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are at least partially ergative in morphology, but fully accusative in syntax (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that are at least partially ergative in both morphology and syntax. While there is a number of languages that belong to the former group, there is only one that belongs to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet is not fully ergative in morphology. No language has been recorded that is fully ergative in both morphology and syntax."
IF Dyirbal is in fact just the only language with FULL syntactic ergativity (so not the only language in Group 2), I would instead rephrase as follows:
"Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are at least partially ergative in morphology, but fully accusative in syntax (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that are at least partially ergative in both morphology and syntax. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only language that displays full syntactic ergativity, yet it is not fully ergative in morphology. No language has been recorded that is fully ergative in both morphology and syntax." 91.119.53.179 ( talk) 16:44, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
The examples are heteronormative! 50.227.225.11 ( talk) 12:28, 15 April 2024 (UTC)
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Retiree? Standee? These examples seem a little convoluted - I've never heard or seen them. What about attendee? This, in comparison, is quite common. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.232.23.97 ( talk) 15:47, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
Hi. Hmm. Needs info about syntactic ergativity? And perhaps expansion & more example? - Ish ishwar 05:24, 2005 Jan 6 (UTC)
Can this be considered a consequence of the fact that in Latin the past participle is passive? I remember there were some cases in Lating where the past participle was used in an active meaning. So it seems the -ee form can express two different meanings: passive and/or completion. — Sebastian ( T) 19:21, 2005 Apr 24 (UTC)
I am only an armchair linguist. But it seems like the behavior of many English verbs, which can be either transitive or intransitive, exhibit something that we might call a "trace of ergativity." These verbs, when transitive, are of the form s-intrans -- verb -- object, but when one noun element is deleted, they are intransitive verbs with a syntax form s-intrans -- verb, where the intransitive subject is the same as the object of the transitive verb. For example:
"I grow flowers" vs. "The flowers are growing."
"I hung a painting on my living room wall" vs. "A painting hangs on my living room wall."
"These changes improve my opinion of this painting" vs. "My opinion of this painting improves with age."
"I showed the apartment to the potential tenant" vs. "This apartment shows very well."
I could list a lot of other examples, but you get the picture. When one noun is deleted from a transitive sentence, with these kinds of verbs, an intransitive sentence is created where the former object of the transitive verb is the subject of the intransitive verb. Is this not a "trace of Ergativy" in English?
EDIT: I added a sentence referencing the article on ergative verbs.
Kdogg36 23:54, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
This has absolutely nothing to do with traces of ergativity. This is simply ambitransitivity -that is, verbs with dual transitivity possibility. You need to be careful in this matter because what you're talking about is a semantic difference which is not a syntactic difference. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.198.68.218 ( talk) 23:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
It seems to me that people speaking accusative languages loves to "find" ergative traces in their own language. It is, however, nothing but an oversimplification of the situation.
That fact that "grow" in "I grow flowers" vs. "The flowers are growing" behaves the way it does, does not make it all right to argue the ergativity case because if you replace the "flowers" with their respective pronouns you get "I grow them" vs. "They grow". Here you can clearly see that the intransitive subject and the transitive object are not treated alike as should be the case, if it were a matter of ergativity.
Thus, this is a semantic difference in the verb "grow", not a syntactic evidence/trace of ergativity.
esegel 0:23, 23 January 2008
Isn't escape ditransitive? As in The man escaped the prison. Thus it seems to be a poor example, perhaps even invalidating the claim. Then again, I'm no expert. Zophar ( talk) 07:03, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, causatives, indeed. Causatives are often cited as ergatives, and that's simply wrong. The reason, I think, as I wrote above, is because ergativity is an interesting phenomenon for us accusative-speaking people, and we thus like to find traces of it in our own languages. These instances, however, are not genuine instances of ergativity.
To Zophar1. As you know I don't like the ergativity analysis advocated by many, so of course I don't like th "escape" example either. "Escape" in "John escaped" could just as easily be argued to be a trasitive verb with the object omitted, just as "I eat" is transitive even though the actual eaten object has been omitted, as it often is. Regardless, I still don't think that the examples constitute ergativity.
esegel —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.82.170.214 ( talk) 11:19, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
The following raises a question:
Based on what little I know of Georgian, this is not an irregularity, and it is probably not explained by a former direct object now gone, and it is also not split ergativity, but instead it's simply an active-stative paradigm. I'd like to see what other intransitive verbs behave like this.
I found this very useful paper... Active languages, by Daniel Andréasson, and in the Georgian section it says that:
Now, how do we get all that into the article?
-- Pablo D. Flores 10:50, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for pointing out the article; I am going to work on expanding this article after I read the relevant sections. Though I have to say that, the theory of "former object having gone" is not something that is just made up to explain the ergative behavior of verbs such as sneeze. I have discussed this with two people who are native Georgian speakers and teach Georgian, and that is how they have explained it to me. This is also not an irregularity, either (I did not notice; when I wrote the explanation of "sneeze", I did not intend to explain this as an irregularity, is that how it sounds like?)
Some other intransitive verbs that behave like sneeze are (I am just going to list a few that comes to my mind right now):
Cough, stroll, jump, swim, roll, cry, dance,... (basically many class 3 verbs who just behave like class 1,(transitive verbs), so there are many intransitive verbs that use the ergative case in the aorist screeve, again, which is not an irregularity (I am assuming, you know the verb classes in Georgian(?)).
Then why don't you write what you wish, and I will double check it for you. Although I am not native speaker of Georgian, I have been studying it for a while, and definitely can be helpful.
The analysis of Tagalog as ergative-absolutive is not accepted unanimously. I've seen Tagalog analyzed as a trigger language, leaving the matter of nom-vs-erg completely aside; and as far as I've been able to research, the language does not fit well in any of the known paradigms. This is the conclusion to an online paper about topicalization in Tagalog:
Another reference:
If anything can be turned into a "subject" in Tagalog using voice operations, and no voice is more marked than the others, then it's a moot point to discuss ergativity vs accusativity. At best one should describe Tagalog's morphosyntactic alignment as mixed ergative-absolutive (but that doesn't say much). The first paper I mentioned says Tagalog is syntactically ergative but has some properties of accusative languages (wh-extraction and raising follow the "nominative" argument), and morphologically it is symmetric as to what can be turned into a subject (there's no true passive or antipassive voice).
-- Pablo D. Flores 28 June 2005 11:16 (UTC)
Nepali has an ergative/instrumental construction by adding -le after a noun. It can be used ergatively with a subject: "Ram-le dunga halyo." meaning "Ram threw the stone." It can also be used instrumentally with an object: "Ma ama-le pakayeko bhat kaye.", meaning "I ate the rice cooked by my mother." Apparently there are parallel constructs in other north indian IE languages.
I am attempting to get a better grip on the exact function/import of ergativity, but this article is too complex for me to dig through. This is my fourth attempt (in over a month) at trying to figure out what the heck it means through this one Wikipedia article. Isn't there some simpler way to state its definition than "An ergative-absolutive language is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs"? I understand what every word of that sentence means. But it is at once thoroughly confusing and also unable to convey the deeper meaning of ergativity. I think it needs some work.
Furthermore, the representation of the ergative vs. accusative section does nothing to elucidate my confusion. I still understand what object/subject/agent mean. But what does the chart represent? Is it saying that the nominative forms of the object are different from those of the accusative in N-A languages? And still, what does it mean? There should be some more thorough examples included in this specific chart. It wouldn't be hard. Just enough to show someone like me what constitutes "different" or "same" once you have made those declarations.
Mind you, I understand a lot about comparative linguistics - though mostly through my own observations and experience - and I am still struggling with the meaning of ergativity, or rather ergativity in contrast with other modes of linguistic expression. Understand very well what transitivity means (i.e. the reason we say "John and I went to the store" instead of "John and me..."). But if someone of my patience and background has trouble understanding the article, doesn't it concern anyone here that other readers/users might have the same troubles? -z42
I understand exactly why -z42 wrote what they wrote and it would be rather pushing it to advise, as Ruakh does, that someone as confused as -z42 admits to being about what ergativity is should suggest how to clarify the concept of ergativity on Wikipedia. Having just read the article for the first time, I must say that it didn't start well for me either. The first sentence may be a good wide-ranging definition but it is far too general for people like -z42 and me to make much sense of on a first read-through. What does it mean to "treat distinctly from"? The question arises in my mind, "in every respect, only in certain respects or merely in respect to morphology?" Dixon's wording, "treated in the same way", leaves the lay person none the wiser from the start but least he swiftly moves on to indicate that it was through the ergative case that such a phenomenon became a concern in linguistics. Notably this Wikipedia article deals primarily with matters of case in order to explicate the feature; would it therefore not be helpful to define ergativity by anchoring the opening definition within the example of cases as the most direct way of informing the lay linguist? Or is Wikipedia merely to be here for buffs? As this is English wikipedia, one can also validly use contrast with English grammar in order to convey the concept. Perhaps a good opening for the lay reader might read like the following.
""An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the patient of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. The feature is sometimes found in syntax but is chiefly observable in the morphology of nouns, ie, in an ergative-absolutive language, one might say, as it were, "HE loves HIM" but one would also say "HIM cares" instead of "HE cares".
Nominative-accusative languages such as English use one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the agent of an transitive verb but another case for the object, eg, "HE cares" (intransitive) and "HE loves him" (transitive). Ergative-absolutive languages work differently by using one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb but another case for the agent, eg, as it were, "HIM cares" (intransitive) and "He loves HIM" (transitive). In this context, HE would be the ergative case and HIM the absolutive case.""
I propose that these simple examples in English are a very immediate way of demonstrating this linguistic feature in terms of case and would be best placed right at the head of the article. The pictures would more usefully come in later as a secondary method of signifying the pattern for the reader's mind once they have already anchored their thinking in example sentences.
I also suggest either removing the word 'subject' and replacing it with the terms 'agent' and 'patient' or removing the words 'agent' and 'subject' and replacing them with the terms 'subject of transitive verb' and 'subject of intransitive verb'. Using the word 'agent' here without the complementary expression of 'patient' and in conjunction with the word 'subject' as terminology to cover both ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative languages seems inconsistent. If the article is going to use the word 'subject' in relation to nominative-accusative language, it is perhaps inadvisable to create the impression for any length of time during reading that an 'agent' is different from a 'subject'. Likewise, either ergative-absolutive grammar has subjects or it doesn't, of course, and if the article is going to use a grammatical term from nominative-accusative grammar such as 'agent' INSTEAD of the word subject, it should also use the term 'patient' instead of the word subject. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.225.35 ( talk) 10:48, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
The article is not very clear. I think it would be best to start with Basq example sentences to explain the concept. Inasmuch as classical grammar terms were developed from non-ergative languages they should be used only with great cautions. For example, would transitive/intransitive have the same connotations for a Basq native speaker ? Even the term Subject-Object may need a refinement. For example, I would regard Ergativity as a bidirectional relationship A-B (A changes B but B also changes A) as opposed to a unidirectional one. Rather than entering into lengthy discussions into different degrees of ergavitity it would seem much better to simply add a table with ergative languages. Additional criteria (split/nonsplit) can then be added in one or more special columns. The restriction of ergativity to subsets can easily be refined that way (e.g. "aorist only)". Sumerian and Berber Languages should also be present with example sentences. It might be interesting to give some statistical data. For example: How many agglutinating languages (%) are ergative how many are not ? How many ergative languages are tonal / pitched ? It should be mentioned that Kurdish has some ergativity although it is considered to be Indoeuropean. Geographical distribution might be interesting. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mdenk ( talk • contribs) 17:02, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure one can take a Japanese sentence like that and say "in contrast" it is nominative-accusative - if one could perhaps supply another Japanese sentence that is equivalent. What is the relation of -a to -ak in Basque? For example.. I could argue that -ak might be equivalent to the marker of the passive agent "-ni" in Japanese... and make a slight alteration to the verb... then perhaps one could argue that Japanese is in this case also ergative, since the changes between the two sample sentences are equal. and since Japanese marks the absolutive case (-ga) on both the man in the first and the boy in the second - like Basque.
Ergative language | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sentence: | Otoko ga tsuita. | Otoko ni kodomo ga mirareta. | ||||
Words: | otoko ga | tsuita | otoko ni | kodomo ga | mirareta | |
Gloss: | man ABS | arrived | man ERG | child ABS | saw | |
Function: | S | VERBintrans | A | O | VERBtrans | |
Translation: | "The man arrived." | "The man saw the child." |
Although I learned to translate the second sentence as the passive, "The boy was seen by the man". Zorgster ( talk) 02:02, 6 August 2013 (UTC) Ergativity is a fairly simple concept. The explanation with the SOP diagram takes something simple and succeeds in making it almost incomprehensible. Please, someone redo that section. I would if I knew how. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8C3:4201:BFC6:CAB:7C81:A42B:EA9B ( talk) 15:57, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
In the Split ergativity section, two lines of devanagari Hindi are given, with what I assume is their Latin transliteration below them. But what are the phrases in the boxes; i.e. "Kur pirtûkekê dikire" and "Kurî pirtûkek kirî"? (ps thats is in kurdish/kurmanji " The boy is buying a book" and "The boy bought a book". This is confusing. 198.150.76.150 13:07, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I, too, find this article unnecessarily obtuse. I'm not a linguist, just someone interested in languages. However, might it not be more informative to provide examples of ergativity (and accusitivity) from the standpoint of ENGLISH than obscure foreign languages? Since it's obvious that anyone on this page understands English, wouldn't it make the most sense to provide a framework for a concept based on a common foundation?
The only part of the article I truly understand is the '-ee' example. Since 'ergativity' must derive from the term for 'work' or 'doer' the concept must have something to do with marking who is doing what.
On the other hand, it would be also helpful if citations were used to provide further help. The accusative example from what little I know appears to be Japanese, it might be helpful to note that for others who might want to track down Japanese linguistic traits.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.125.95.49 ( talk • contribs) .
I suggest that the use of examples of English pronouns in order to demonstrate how English does NOT work shows very clearly to the English speaker how differently to English ergative-absolutive languages DO work. The didactic principle here is contrast, specifically between the morphology of nominative and accusative cases and in relation to agent, patient and object and transitive/intransitive verbs. The use of examples such as "HIM cares" and "HE loves him" etc can and do indicate this. One can then proceed to concrete examples in ergative-absolutive languages to show the precise morphological application in grammatical context in the pertinent languages. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.156.225.35 ( talk) 11:16, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Can someone please explain the sentence:
'I was given a book'
I wasn't given at all, the book was given. In Latin, Russian, German etc 'I' in this sentence would be in the dative case. Why don't we say in English:
'Me was given a book'?
Any ideas? Does this have anything to do with ergativity?
TAF
Note that that article needs help, if anyone here is buff on this term. MaxEnt ( talk) 19:44, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
The following was in the article: ", and P is indeed more appropriate than is O, because O is biased towards accusative languages. Analogically, it is also defined as Agent of transitive verb below, not as subject. If accusative and ergative languages are to be compared, we need a non-biased terminology, completely omitting subject/object)"
Please refrain from stating what "we" need to do within the actual text of the article, as it is unencyclopedic.-- Jeffro77 ( talk) 15:41, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Here is the example of hypothetical ergative English from the text:
I (S) traveled; She (S) traveled. Me (A) invited she (O) to go with me; Her (A) invited I (O) to go with her.
I speak a split-ergative language myself, and this seems wrong somehow. I'm no linguist, but it seems to me that what we're saying is this:
Me (S) sleep; Her (S) sleeps. (travel doesn't give ergative in my language) I (A) invited her (O) to go with me; She (A) invited me (O) to go with her.
The (S) in the intransitive sentence "feels" more like an object, and the (A) and (O) in the transitive seems reversed. Perhaps it's just my imagination, but could someone with a bit more linguistic knowledge check this, please? -- 88.90.165.48 ( talk) 21:23, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
This page is nearly unreadable without checking the stupid terminology used here.
67.194.132.91 ( talk) 00:58, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
Jimzip ( talk) 03:48, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
It seems to me that there is a trace of, or shall we say something analogous to, ergativity in English past/passive participles used as adjectives. Specifically, when the participle of a transitive verb is used as an adjective, its noun is the patient -- the recipient of the action -- and the object of the sentence using the active verb :
But when the participle of an intransitive verb is used as an adjective, its noun is also the patient, even though in this case it is the subject of the sentence that uses the active verb:
If this is right, there must be a reference for it, and it could go in the article as something that an English-only speaker might be able to relate to easily. Duoduoduo ( talk) 21:11, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
This article gets off to a bad start by being ferociously difficult even in its most basic explanation. The first couple of sentences before the baffling diagram might be just about all right, but the part that "explains" the diagram is horrendous. Suddenly the terms "argument" and "core argument" are plucked from thin air and become part of the "explanation". This is an article that can only inform those who already know a lot about the subject, i.e. it is pretty pointless. Wikipedia articles need to be understandable to the general, moderately educated, reader. I cannot really understand it, and I write as someone who studied languages, including linguistics, at a famous old university. Judging by the response to a previous user who complained about this problem, those who are in the know may not have been very sympathetic up to now. Can someone fix it? 08:44, 15 January 2012 (UTC)~ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pawebster ( talk • contribs)
The morpheme {-a} does not mark the absolutive is a mark of grammatical number, the absolutive in Euskera is marked with ∅, and the ergative with-k, please clarify this.
Reference in Spanish: http://jmacosta.galeon.com/sketch.htm
I'm Lingüistic Student of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, thanks for your attention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.26.12.229 ( talk) 10:36, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
I eat bread:
Min nan xwar. Ez nên (nanî) dixwim.
Min nan werd Ez nanî wena -- Alsace38 ( talk) 12:16, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Well, I tried to make it easier for English speakers to understand (for instance, replacing early instances of "argument" with "subject", since in English, the argument of an intransitive sentence IS the subject [and it took me 2 hours of MSPaint diagrams to figure that out]), but may have sacrificed complete accuracy in the proccess. The header certainly needed work; you had to look up "argument", and within that page, "predicate", and still didn't understand what you were reading, so I made the changes listed. I also defined the terms "intransitive", "transitive", "agent", and "patient" in the article itself for clarity, so that you won't have to have 5 or 6 tabs open.
I also reversed the "vs" part, just for continuity (so that the whole "A/S/O" thing would flow from the "ergativity" part), but that was just for aesthetics. If it's unsatisfactory, those were all I changed, so just revert my first edit (friggin' coding errors!).
In other words, I tried. :P
Edit: I have no idea what's wrong with the diagrams. I don't remember touching that part... 74.177.127.125 ( talk) 04:03, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
Could we add an example to the lead, pointing out as we're making it that it's not exact? Such as: "As a rough, but not completely adequate, example, English pronouns align in an nominative-accusative way:
Here the subjective (nominative) forms "I/he" are the most basic, and the "me/him" objective (accusative) forms are different. An ergative-absolutive language might instead have:
Here the absolutive forms "me/him" are the most basic, and the "I/he" ergative forms are different. Ergativity can be expressed in other ways as well, such as which part a verb agrees with when conjugated." I'm also wondering if a crash-course in subject/object vs. agent/patient, probably using English passive voice to illustrate, would be genuinely helpful, or just further confusing and un-encyclopedic. Lsfreak ( talk) 05:04, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
I couldn't follow the text in the original article (and I'm not a total linguistic incompetent)
An ip editor ( 86.156.225.35 ) wrote this text above -
for the lay reader
""An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the agent of transitive verbs distinctly from the patient of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. The feature is sometimes found in syntax but is chiefly observable in the morphology of nouns, ie, in an ergative-absolutive language, one might say, as it were, "HE loves HIM" but one would also say "HIM cares" instead of "HE cares".
Nominative-accusative languages such as English use one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the agent of an transitive verb but another case for the object, eg, "HE cares" (intransitive) and "HE loves him" (transitive). Ergative-absolutive languages work differently by using one case for the patient of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb but another case for the agent, eg, as it were, "HIM cares" (intransitive) and "He loves HIM" (transitive). In this context, HE would be the ergative case and HIM the absolutive case.""
I am quite inclined to insert that chunk of text into the article just after the following lines:
These different arguments are usually symbolized as follows:
O = object of transitive verb (also symbolized as P for "patient") S = core argument of intransitive verb A = agent of transitive verb
(here)
If the examples in that quote are correct then I think I now understand what is meant by ergative-absolute language where the article itself was unclear. I don't know how watched this page is, but if I don't see any feedback in the next week I'll go ahead with that change. I'm still not 100% sure what the quote means by the words 'in this context' so expanding on that would be good. Cheers EdwardLane ( talk) 08:49, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
Perhaps a sentence diagram could help in comparing this type of language with English. I think we can all agree that the terminology is not easily understood by someone who hasn't otherwise studied the distinction between the language types. Fortunately, a sentence diagram might help communicate what terms mean and how to parse and write in languages other than what we're familiar with. Just because this isn't a "simple English" article doesn't mean that the typical reader of English should decidedly not understand it. Also or alternatively, an article covering the various types of languages should cover some distinctions with a sentence diagram. If there is already such an article, it might help to include an obvious link to that. (I, for one, haven't noticed it if it exists.) -- D. F. Schmidt ( talk) 15:08, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
"The Zazaki, Gorani, Sorani, and Kurmanji are the only ergative languages of the Iranian language family."
But isn't Pashto also an Iranian language (Eastern Iranian, to be exact) which is known to exhibit "split ergativity"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:304:CC94:6AC0:112:44D9:610D:C7AE ( talk) 05:39, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
For instance, instead of saying "she moved" and "I moved her", speakers of an ergative language would say the equivalent of "her moved" and "I moved her".
This is one way of looking at it, but not the only way. You could equally well say:
instead of saying "she moved" and "I moved her", speakers of an ergative language would say the equivalent of "she moved" and "by me she moved".
Indeed this is the most obvious way of looking at languages such as Hindi (see Split ergativity) where you have sentences such as laṛke-ne kitāb xarīdī, which might be glossed as 'by boy book (was) bought' (the verb xarīdī here is a feminine participle, agreeing with kitāb 'book'); similarly in Basque (see Basque language) we are told that some verbs are loan-words derived from Latin passive participles ending in -tus, implying that the Basque-speakers who borrowed those participles felt they were the equivalent of verbs in their own language. So I think this formulation in the introduction is possibly rather misleading. It would be better if it were removed. Kanjuzi ( talk) 04:37, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
I can't see why the title 'Ergative–absolutive language' has a dash in it rather than a hyphen. This punctuation seems to me rather bizarre. But in any case surely the article would be better titled 'Ergative language'; since if you look up the two phrases on Google ngrams ergative language vs. ergative-absolutive language you will see that the phrase 'ergative language' is much more commonly used, in fact it is over 100 times more common. I propose therefore that it should be changed.
Another thing about this article, however, is that it deals only with ergative-absolutive languages and nominative-accusative languages, without mentioning except in one brief sentence that there are also tripartite languages in which all three participants (agent, object, and subject) are in a different case. The reader has to get quite a long way down the article before he or she comes across that sentence. Would it not be less confusing if the two articles 'Ergative-absolutive language' and 'Tripartite language' were merged? It would surely be much better if that rather useful SOA diagram near the beginning of the article were in three parts, one for each of the three possibilities. Kanjuzi ( talk) 05:04, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
"Note that the word subject, as it is typically defined in grammars of nominative–accusative languages, is inapplicable when referring to ergative–absolutive languages, or when discussing morphosyntactic alignment in general."
There seems to be some potential for confusion here, first since the abbreviation 'S' for the 'core argument' of an intransitive verb implies that it is an abbreviation of the word 'subject', but also the writer goes on to refer to ergative languages as being 'SVO' etc. And of course, if it is not appropriate to use the word 'subject' when speaking of ergative languages, it must be equally inappropriate to use the word 'object' of the equivalent in an ergative language of a sentence such as 'John broke the window' (especially as, as I pointed out above, such a sentence could be equally well be glossed as 'By John the window (was) broken' or 'Because of John the window broke'; looked at from this point of view the word 'window' would be the equivalent of the subject, not the object). The words 'subject', 'agent', and 'patient' might be better, providing that it is made clear that 'subject' refers to sentences with intransitive verbs only. Again, I would urge the introduction to be rewritten making it clear that there are three participants, S, A, O, and that in Nominative-accusative languages S and A are treated the same, in Ergative-absolutive languages A and O are treated the same, while in tripartite languages all three are treated differently. Kanjuzi ( talk) 05:39, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
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The alleged third type, "Ergative-accusative", is defined as having ergative-absolutive alignment for nouns and nominative-accusative alignment for pronouns, but the phrase links to the article about tripartite languages, and those are defined in a completely different way, namely as languages that mark the ergative, absolutive and accusative participant in three different ways. I would say that this "third type" with a split between nouns and pronouns is a case of what would normally be called split ergativity, not "ergative-accusative alignment" or "tripartite alignment". -- 94.155.68.202 ( talk) 01:26, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
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There is, in my opinion, too much jargon in the intro for it to be of any use to most readers ( WP:TECHNICAL). If it could be made more accessible (for example by explaining terms), that would be ideal. – Thjarkur (talk) 15:50, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
"Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that—on top of being ergative morphologically—also show ergativity in syntax."
The phrasing here is unclear in terms of whether languages merely need to show some morphological/syntactical ergativity or be fully ergative in either aspect.
"No language has been recorded in which both the morphological and syntactical ergative are present."
This suggests that languages need in fact be a) fully ergative in morphology, but not at all in syntax (Group 1) or b) fully ergative in both morphology and syntax (Group 2). Hence, Group 2 is empty? But then we get the following sentence:
"Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter."
Alright, so Group 2 isn't empty and what the previous sentence really should have said is "No language has been recorded that is fully ergative in both morphology and syntax." This would then also make more sense with the next sentence, which actually gives an example of a language that shows both forms of ergativity, ergo would fall into Group 2, one would think. So Group 2's inclusion criteria should be "at least partially ergative in both morphology and syntax". And so I assume the same goes for Group 1, which should then be "at least partially ergative in morphology, but not at all in syntax."
"Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet it displays accusative alignment with certain pronouns."
So Dyirbal is fully ergative in terms of syntax, but only partially in terms of morphology, hence a Group 2 language, no? In fact, is it the ONLY Group 2 language, as no other languages show at least partial syntactic ergativity per the preceding sentence?
Suggested rephrasing:
If Dyirbal is actually the only language in Group 2:
"Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are at least partially ergative in morphology, but fully accusative in syntax (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that are at least partially ergative in both morphology and syntax. While there is a number of languages that belong to the former group, there is only one that belongs to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet is not fully ergative in morphology. No language has been recorded that is fully ergative in both morphology and syntax."
IF Dyirbal is in fact just the only language with FULL syntactic ergativity (so not the only language in Group 2), I would instead rephrase as follows:
"Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are at least partially ergative in morphology, but fully accusative in syntax (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that are at least partially ergative in both morphology and syntax. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only language that displays full syntactic ergativity, yet it is not fully ergative in morphology. No language has been recorded that is fully ergative in both morphology and syntax." 91.119.53.179 ( talk) 16:44, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
The examples are heteronormative! 50.227.225.11 ( talk) 12:28, 15 April 2024 (UTC)