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

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Monday 16 February 2009 08:52:23 tijlan wrote:
> 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.

I say either Lojban doesn't have a morphosyntactic alignment, or it has one 
that no natlang has.

If I were explaining morphosyntactic alignment in Lojban terms, I'd say that 
the subject of a transitive verb in an accusative language is x1, whereas in 
an ergative language it's x2. I'm not sure how I'd explain split ergativity. 
The one instance in which I know how it arose, which is modern Indic, the 
past tense was originally a participle, used as a passive with the 
instrumental.

Pierre


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