On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 2:32 PM, tijlan
<pascal.akihiko@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Lojban is as
> nominative-accusative as it gets. (Predicate logic was invented by people
> who spoke and were familiar with nominative-accusative languages.) If the
> correct Lojban for the first sentence were "klama lo nanmu" (not "klama *fa*
> lo nanmu), then we could probably say that Lojban is ergative-absolutive.
Syntactic ergativity is quite rare
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative-absolutive_language).
There's no morphological inflection in Lojban, so whatever morphosyntactic alignment it has has to be syntactic and not morpho-.
And I
don't see why the x2 of "klama" being the agent/subject would be so
indicative of an ergative-absolutive syntax.
Because then the argument of an intransitive verb is treated the same as the object of a transitive verb (treating 'klama' as intransitive, which may be arguable).
The Basque example
already shows that the subject doesn't necessarily follows the verb in
an ergative-absolutive language. I've learned that there are also
nominative-accusative languages where the verb preceds the subject,
such as formal Arabic, Gaelic, Hawaiian, and, to a lesser extent,
Romanian, Hungarian and Finnish.
Of course. VSO languages are not rare, and most of them are accusative, not ergative. (You can add Biblical Hebrew to the list.) The question isn't the order of the sentence constituents, but how the argument of an intransitive verb is treated compared to the subject and object of a transitive verb.