Middle and Passive
kent lee
k-lee7 at students.uiuc.edu
Thu Dec 12 01:47:30 EST 2002
> Kent, I am confused by your use of "ergative" as a semantic category.
> relevant only to some languages. It is indeed unfortunate that different
> linguists use the same word for different things; but I suspect that
> your use is the minority one and so it is not for you to complain at the
> majority use.
I believe i'm using the term as it's normally used in theoretical
linguistics and psycholinguistics. It involves not only morphosyntax, but
argument structure as well (a level of lexical-semantic-syntactic
interface; see Ray Jackendoff, 1997, _The Architecture of the Language
Faculty_). This is different from how some linguistic typologists and
functionalists use the term. I merely wanted to raise the possibility of
some of these Greek middles being ergative. So i don't think it's fair or appropriate to
accuse me of complaining. Let's keep the discourse professional here.
> We certainly should not think that careful distinctions between case
> roles in actives and passives are a modern phenomenon, a product of
> Latin-based grammar and modern philosophy. The linguistic evidence
> clearly shows that even the languages of very "primitive" groups e.g.
> here in Australia have complex and well-defined systems of ergativity;
> and that remote minority groups' languages e.g. in South Asia and Iran
> have more developed ergativity than related national languages. The
> distinctions between case roles may be more blurred in Greek, although
> that would hardly be typical of the language which is usually very
> precise, but it may also be that there are very clear distinctions which
> have not been fully understood.
Indeed, i think Australian languages were the first major evidence for
ergatives. And ergativity is a cross-linguistic feature just like, say,
transitivity, so it's not surprising that English, Australian, or
whatever, would have it (in fact, ergatives are fairly common in Korean, as
well). Getting back to the original point, the distinction between
ergatives and other creatures is probably important for not only world
level interpretation of Greek (or whatever language), but for translation
studies or other studies that hinge on such interpretive issues.
kent lee
http://ux6.cso.uiuc.edu/~k-lee7
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