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Topic: Ergative-absolutive language

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Ergative-absolutive language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the subject of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. The distinguishing feature of an ergative language is that it maintains an equivalence between the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb, while treating the subject of a transitive verb differently. Prototypical ergative languages are, for the most part, restricted to specific regions of world: the Caucasus, parts of North America and Mesoamerica, and Australia. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Ergative-absolutive_language   (1140 words)

Fusional language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A feature that distinguishes fusional languages from agglutinating ones is the occurence of irregular forms: this could not or hardly happen in agglutinating language since the synthetic elements retain a meaning of their own. A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to "squish together" many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment. Fusional languages are generally believed to have descended from agglutinating languages, though there is no linguistic evidence in the form of attested language changes to confirm this view. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Fusional_language   (246 words)

Synthetic language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A synthetic language, also called an inflected language, is a language which uses inflectional forms, such as noun declension and verb conjugation, as a primary means of indicating the grammatical function of the words in the sentence, often to the point where the word order in a clause is arbitrary or merely connotative. Old English was a Germanic language, related to the language of Norse invaders who conquered part of England around A.D. A pidgin evolved to facilitate communication between the English and the Norse, which resulted in the loss of many forms of inflection used in Old English. The Navajo language is famous for its use by the United States during World War II as a spoken code. www.encyclopedia-online.info /Synthetic_language   (755 words)

Glossary Contrast this with nominative-accusative languages, where the subject is always marked with one case (conventionally known as the Nominative), and with ergative-absolutive languages, where the subject is marked according to the transitivity of the verb (a syntactic property). The ergative languages tend to have an antipassive voice that deletes the object (detransitivization), changing the subject from agent (ergative case) to patient (absolutive case). Said of active languages where the grammatical subject (S) is marked with one of two core cases, Agentive or Patientive, according to the semantics of the verb and the context. www.angelfire.com /scifi2/nyh/glossary.html   (4857 words)

Linguistic typology Another common classification is whether the language is accusative or ergative. ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax), or behaves ergatively only in some contexts (this is called split ergativity, and is usually based on the grammatical person of the arguments or in the tense/aspect of the verb). If the language has casess, this is determined by whether the subject of an intransitive verb has the same case as the subject or the object of a transitive verb. www.brainyencyclopedia.com /encyclopedia/l/li/linguistic_typology.html   (419 words)

Dave's Language Creation Notebook The absolutive case is a case that marks the subject of intransitive verbs and the direct object of transitive verbs in ergative-absolutive languages. Finally, the ergative case is the name for a case that marks the subject of a transitive verb (not necessarily the agent) in ergative-absolutive languages. In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of an intransitive verb is treated the same as the direct object of a transitive verb; subjects of transitive verbs are treated differently. dedalvs.free.fr /notes.html   (13067 words)

Tagalog grammar: Encyclopedia topic There are three types of case markers: absolutive (absolutive: in ergative-absolutive languages, the absolutive case is used to mark the subject of... Absolutive or nominative markers mark the actor of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. Ergative or genitive markers mark the object (usually indefinite) of an intransitive verb and the actor of a transitive one. www.absoluteastronomy.com /reference/tagalog_grammar   (1821 words)

Articles About Basque Language E.g., bas³  ("the forest", absolutive case) vs. b¡so  ("the glass", absolutive case; a borrowing from Spanish vaso); bas³ k ("the forest", ergative case) vs. b¡so k ("the glass", ergative case) vs. b¡soak ("the forests" or "the glasses", absolutive case). The subject of an intransitive verb is in the absolutive case (which is unmarked), and the same case is used for the direct object of a transitive verb. The language has official status in those territories which are within the Basque Autonomous Community where it is spoken and promoted heavily, but only partially in Navarre, which is divided by the law in three distinct language areas (this law is strongly rejected by the Basque-speaking people of Navarre). www.lecommerce.net /wiki/index.php?title=Basque_language   (2033 words)

15.3334.txt Historically, the Abaza language had been spoken along the coast line of the Black Sea between what today is Tuapse in the North and the river Bzyb in the South. Still, it is my deepest conviction that without understanding the overall strategies and 'mechanisms' of a language (together with their communicative and historical settings), the analysis of particular phenomena may rest episodic. Finally, Abaza, just as it is true for its sister languages, operated through a remarkable paradigm of phonemic variation that gives us for Abaza a system of roughly sixty consonants and two vowels (note that with respect to the number of phonemes, Abaza is rather moderate compared to e.g. www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de /linguist/issues/15/15.3334.txt   (3588 words)

Null morpheme - Indopedia, the Indological knowledgebase It's also frequent to find null affixation for the least-marked cases (the nominative in nominative-accusative languages, and the absolutive in ergative-absolutive languages). In languages that show the above distinctions, it's quite common to employ null affixation to (not) mark singular number, present tense and third persons (English is unusual in its marking of the third person singular with a non-zero morpheme, by contrast with a null morpheme for others). In analytic languages with little or no derivational morphology, such as Mandarin Chinese, it makes no sense to speak of null morphemes or zero derivation. www.indopedia.org /Null_morpheme.html   (429 words)

Tenser, said the Tensor: March 7, 2005 - March 13, 2005 Archives However, selecting languages is very hard to do without biasing the sample—for example, in practice you're often limited to written sources, which restricts you to descriptive grammars written in a language you can read and that your library has a copy of. However, if we're really interested in exploring the full range of possible human languages, playing in the same small sandbox of well-known languages (and occasionally adding a new example when somebody strays off the beaten path) simply won't cut it as a method of searching the human language space. Name a group of non-mutually intelligible languages that are often called "dialects". tenser.typepad.com /tenser_said_the_tensor/2005/week10   (635 words)

Old Skourene This is a transformation which demotes the original ergative to the absolutive, and the absolutive to the genitive. The ergative is used for what we consider the subject of transitive verbs— and those only; the subject of intransitives is put in the absolutive. Its argument is therefore taken to be the thief, demoted from ergative to absolutive. www.zompist.com /lenani.htm   (7834 words)

LINGUIST List 6.125: Phonology, Syntax, Semantics Epena Pedee is an ergative-absolutive language, but one in which the subject has an important role, in that it manifests number agreement with the verb. The author describes the major grammatical structures of the language from morphology through discourse, with an introductory phonological sketch. Burquest and Payne have produced an introductory textbook oriented primarily to students interested in previously unstudied or little studied languages and who need a practical guide on how to carry out their investigation. www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/issues/6/6-125.html   (486 words)

BLS96.doc In Object questions Subjects and Objects retain their ergative and absolutive case (2a), but in Subject questions the clause is antipassivized, i.e. Constraint rankings vary across languages, but are fixed within a particular language; thus, one ranking is assumed to hold for all constructions in a language and defines its grammar. The remainder of the languages in the survey form questions by using a construction reserved for questioning that is different from either the declarative form or any focus construction (e.g. www.ling.ohio-state.edu /~raymond/BLS96.doc   (4427 words)

Starport - The Next Generation A fundamental distinction to start off with, because it's a good and simple one, is Ergative-absolutive language [en.wikipedia.org] vs. Nominative-accusative language [en.wikipedia.org] or even the very uncommon, Active language [en.wikipedia.org]. Thus, since this is left to context, the language is requisitely not an Active language. From the larger word system, the language is highly synthetic, but on the smaller word system, the language is almost entirely Analytic. starport.dnsalias.net /index.php?show=article&id=394   (1906 words)

LINGUIST List 3.32: Nominative in Non-finite Clauses What this calls for, I think, is not a revision of GB or theories of Nominative Case assignment/checking, but rather a closer look at the nature of Ergativity and Case relations in Ergative languages. While much recent literature both on certain languages, and on Ergativity as a phenomenon has returned to the name Nominative for this Case, I think this terminology firstly creates confusion, but more importantly presumes a certain theoretical analysis without question or discussion. This is not really the case in languages like Lezgian and Dravidian. www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/issues/3/3-32.html   (744 words)

What is antipassive voice? Antipassive voice is a voice in an ergative-absolutive language in which the salience of the normally absolutive noun phrase is, according to some analysts, decreased. a noun phrase that normally has absolutive case is marked as an oblique or an indirect object, and www.sil.org /linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAntipassiveVoice.htm   (121 words)

The world's top buginese language websites It is an Ergative-absolutive language of the Austronesian language family. It was traditionally written using the Lontara script, of the Brahmic family, which is also used for the Makasar language and the Mandar language, but now is often written using the Roman alphabet. Buginese (locally Basa Ugi, elsewhere also Bahasa Bugis, Bugis, Bugi, De') is the language spoken by about four million people, mainly in the southern part of Celebes (Sulawesi), in Indonesia. dirs.org /wiki-article-tab.cfm/buginese_language   (148 words)

Kittenishly Doomy Thoughts Maybe it's just the ethnocentric part of me that thinks an ergative-absolutive language is more approachable when it's European, but I suspect it has more to do with its uniqueness as a language that's not related to any others attested. The short short answer is that it's somwhat meaningless to talk about the number of "words" in a language that morphologically rich, since you can make infinite numbers of words about anything. A slighly older post: Something approaching the truth about the number of Eskimo words for snow. kitten.ofdoom.com /2004/03/some-stuff-from-language-log-slighly.html   (190 words)

Science Fair Projects - Ergative-absolutive language An ergative-absolutive language (or just ergative language) is one that marks the subject of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. If there's no case marking, the language can resort to word order (for example, the absolutive argument comes before the verb and the ergative argument comes after it). Other languages that employ an ergative-absolutive system are: www.all-science-fair-projects.com /science_fair_projects_encyclopedia/Ergative-absolutive_language   (190 words)

Ergativity in Indo-Aryan This pattern is lost in the modern language, as illustrated in example (9), which documents the absence of ergative morphology in the modern Bengali perfect aspect. However, most languages are morphologically ergative in that pieces of the morphology serve to mark the ergative or active pattern. Despite these and some differences in vocabulary, the two languages are structurally identical.) (1) shows a transitive clause with an ergative, (2) an unaccusative intransitive where no ergative is possible, and (3) shows an unergative intransitive where the ergative is optional and generally signals a degree of agentivity. www.stanford.edu /~adeo/ia-erg.html   (190 words)

Ergativity in Suleimaniye Kurdish In the case of any one particular language, it may not always be obvious whether the grammar is ergative/absolutive or nominative/accusative; this is true partially because grammars which employ features of the ergative/absolutive system tend to employ a combination of both systems, rather than being purely ergative. If all three may relativize (which is true for English), then this test is not useful for determining whether or not a language employs ergative/absolutive or nominative/accusative syntax. The measure of syntactic ergativity present in a language can be gauged by the extent to which the application of syntactic rules differentiates subject and object as a class separate from agent. home.earthlink.net /~rcfriend/ESK.htm   (190 words)

Iraq Museum International Open Encyclopedia: Sumerian language In an ergative language the subject of a sentence with a direct object is in the so-called ergative case, which in Sumerian is marked with the suffix -e. A split ergative language is one that behaves as ergative in some contexts and as a nominative-accusative language (like English) in others. The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BC. www.baghdadmuseum.org /ref/index.php?title=Sumerian_language   (190 words)

418.report.3.html Is there a nominative (or absolutive) slot in the verb for agreement affixes as opposed to an ergative (or accusative) slot? And in some languages a morphological distinction is made between the subjects of "active" vs. "stative" intransitive predicates: See Whaley, pp. "Subject" (and "object") in the target language can be established with fair reliability by looking at the subjects (and objects) in the glosses provided a number of different examples are considered. www-personal.umich.edu /~pehook/418.report.3.html   (190 words)

Active language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Active languages are a relatively new field of study; in other times active alignment was not recognized as such, and was mostly treated as an interesting deviation from the standard alternatives (nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive). If the language has morphological case, then the arguments of a transitive verb are marked using the agentive case for the subject and the patientive case for the object, while the argument of an intransitive verb is marked as either one. An active language is one where the only argument of an intransitive verb (that is, the subject) is marked sometimes in the same way as the subject of a transitive verb, and some other times in the same way as the direct object of a transitive verb. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Nominative-absolutive_language   (190 words)

Naamval in natuurlijke taal To sum up, a simple division of case realizing languages into nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive is totally insufficient. In Inuit languages, so-called antipassive sentences (with an antipassive suffix on the verb) have an instrumental case on the object, whereas the subject bears absolutive case. Such language samples are in principle unlimited as to size, but it can be expected that a sample of 250 languages will be adequate, given that this sample is balanced for genetic and areal spreading. baserv.uci.kun.nl /~hdehoop/proposal.htm   (190 words)

Morphosyntactic alignment - Result for Morphosyntactic alignment - Meaning of Morphosyntactic alignment - Definition of Morphosyntactic alignment - Dictionary of Meaning - www.mauspfeil.net For instance, "a" always represents the formal marker by which the experiencer is signified, called either the "nominative" or the "absolutive" depending upon whether this morpheme marks the agent of the action (as in nominative-accusative languages) or the patient (as in ergative-absolutive languages). Some others ( tripartite language s) use a separate case or syntax for each argument (which may conventionally be called the nominative case, the intransitive case, and the absolutive case). In a language with morphological case marking, the experiencer and agent are both marked with the nominative case, while the patient is marked with the accusative case. www.mauspfeil.net /Morphosyntactic_alignment.html   (190 words)

Tagalog grammar There are three types of case markers: absolutive ( nominative), ergative ( genitive), and oblique. Absolutive or nominative markers mark the actor of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. Tagalog grammar is the study of grammar of the Tagalog language. www.worldhistory.com /wiki/T/Tagalog-grammar.htm   (190 words)

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