#absolutive

[roomfive16-blog]

Micromatic- Uncanny (Royce Wood Jr Remix)

[eunych-born-eunych]

So is Mandarin ergative-absolutive or what?

I just see a lot of verbs where the 'subject' is the patient if there isn't an object. And I worry about you, Mandarin.

You know you can tell me anything, right?

我爱你。 Nothing's going to change that.

[linguismstics]

Linguistics: Nominative/Accusative and Ergative/Absolutive systems

In a sentence, what is the subject and what is the object? They are both referred to by some as ‘arguments’ of the verb. Some verbs take both (transitive verbs), others do not take an object (intransitive verbs); some take two objects (ditransitive verbs), whilst others seem to have neither an object nor a subject!

You may have been taught that the subject of a sentence stands for the do-er and the object stands for the done-to. This sort of works as a rough guide but, for example, can inanimate objects be do-ers? What about passive sentences where the object of the verb becomes the subject? Is it still the object? The problem is that most traditional definitions confuse grammatical subjects and objects with thematic subjects and objects. In a passive sentence in English, the thematic object is the grammatical subject, whilst in a transitive sentence the thematic object is grammatical object.

Now, we have two possibilities for subject/object marking (if marking is present at all). A language might choose to differentiate the grammatical subject and object (so-called nominative/accusative system) or it might choose to differentiate the thematic subject and object (so-called ergative/absolutive systems). In fact, a language might choose to make use of both these systems (purely ergative/absolutive languages are much rarer than purely nominative/accusative languages). Such languages that exhibit both systems are often called split-ergative languages. Examples include Kartvelian, Hindi and Dyirbal. (How they split the systems is very interesting in and of itself).

A widely-used English example to get these notions across involves the verb ‘sink’. This verb can be either transitive or intransitive.

The fighter plane sank the ship (transitive).

The ship sank (intransitive).

English speakers often refer to ships as ‘she’, which is useful for us because the nominative/accusative distinction has been lost in English everywhere except for with pronouns!

The fighter plane (NOM) sank her (ACC).

She (NOM) sank.

Notice that ‘she’ changes form depending on whether it is grammatical subject or object. However, thematically ‘she’ (i.e. the ship) is the same in both sentences. In both scenarios it is the one going down beneath the waves.

If English worked like an ergative/absolutive language, ‘she’ or ‘the ship’ would not change form between these two sentences, so effectively the (thematic) object of transitive verbs is marked the same as the (grammatical) subject of intransitive verbs, and marked differently from the (thematic) subject of transitive verbs.