[lojban] Re: nominative-accusative & ergative-absolutive

[tijlan <pascal.akihiko@gmail.com>]

2009/2/16 Adam Raizen <adam.raizen@gmail.com>:
> There's no morphological inflection in Lojban, so whatever morphosyntactic
> alignment it has has to be syntactic and not morpho-.

Right, I'm not saying that Lojban is morphologically
ergative-absolutive, but that it conveniently neutralizes the
differing nominative and ergative perspectives.


>> 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).

However, the object of a transitive verb in an ergative-absolutive
language is not agentive, is it? In "Gizonak mutila ikusi du",
"mutila" is the object and has the same absolutive suffix as what
"gizon-" as the argument/subject of an intransitive verb would take,
but it is not agentive; it's not the boy who is seeing himself. Now if
a hypothetical place structure of "viska" is such that the x2 is the
agent of "seeing", it remains as the subject, not the object, despite
the conversion. Likewise, the hypothetical word order in "klama lo
nanmu" simply means that "lo nanmu" is the agentive subject of
"klama", which could still be used to correspondently translate
sentences of either ergative-absolutive ("Etorri da | gizonak.") or
nominative-accusative ("Ekalvenis | viro."). The point is that, in
Lojban, speakers of either type can talk without unlearning their
native perspective of the linguistic alignment, apart from the word
order.


mu'o mi'e tijlan


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