Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Of or relating to a language, such as Georgian, in which the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are expressed by one grammatical case, and the subject of a transitive verb is expressed by another.
- adjective Of or relating to the grammatical case of the subject of a transitive verb in such a language.
- noun The ergative case.
- noun An ergative inflection.
- noun A nominal having an ergative form.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective grammar Used of various situations where the subject of
transitive constructions have differentgrammatical cases orthematic relations to those ofintransitive constructions. - noun linguistics the
ergative case - noun linguistics an
ergative verb or other expression
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The 'ergative' marking patterns of Proto-Indo-European therefore do not fit the noun hierarchy as proposed by Silverstein 1976 and therefore no longer support the traditional ergative hypothesis for Proto-Indo-European.
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The 'ergative' marking patterns of Proto-Indo-European therefore do not fit the noun hierarchy as proposed by Silverstein 1976 and therefore no longer support the traditional ergative hypothesis for Proto-Indo-European.
Archive 2009-10-01 2009
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But there is another common language type in the world called ergative-absolutive.
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These languages are rare and, for the most part, not well-studied, and my understanding is that the analysis of them as having deep ergative is controversial...which brings up the main point of the post again.
Do Language Universals Exist? GamesWithWords 2010
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Paleoglot: Nipping the PIE ergative *-s theory right in the bud skip to main
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Nipping the PIE ergative *-s theory right in the b...
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The view that PIE case endings, nominative *-s and genitive *-ós, are somehow related by a magical ablaut and stemming from an ergative case came about from the fact that, based on the wealth of data from world languages that we now have, nominative cases which mark the subject of a sentence are supposed to be unmarked cases.
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Octavià: "Wait a moment, my idea is that pre-PIE ... was an ergative language which used an ergative marker *-sV related to the Hurro-Urartian one."
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Wait a moment, my idea is that pre-PIE or whatever name you want to use, even "Indo-Aegean" was an ergative language which used an ergative marker *-sV related to the Hurro-Urartian one.
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The similarity with the HU ergative is an argument in favour of this theory.
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