Re: understanding ergativity

Joachim Pense wrote: 
Having read some elementary descriptions of what an ergative language is, I
try the following gedankenexperiment.

Take Latin, as it is, but apply one minor change:
For transitive sentences, make the passive the unmarked form, and active the
marked one, that is, assume that people prefer to say

   (A) frater sorore laudatur

rather than

   (B) soror fratrem laudat

Also, call the active "antipassive", and the ablative of "sorore" an
"ablativus ergativus", and voila - you got an ergative language.


But to make it a real ergative language, you'd need another, more radical change: turn all intransitive verbs into deponents, with passive-like morphology. The definition of ergativity is: subjects of intransitive verbs should behave like patients of transitive verbs, right? I think that this should apply not just to the nominal case forms, but also to the corresponding verbal morphology, so you'd need to turn your Latin passive morphology into a basic unmarked morphology for all verbs. Or at least the unmarked morphology for the intransitive verbs shouldn't be so deceptively similar to your new "anti-passive". :-)

Lukas


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