Talk:Split ergativity

Additional split condition -- Gender

Hittite is split ergative and the distinction is done by gender, the neuter/inanimate gender being ergative and the common gender being nominative accusative.

Is this worth adding an additional part to the split conditions section, or do we need several languages to qualify? 184.78.207.117 (talk) 04:02, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Marking-based split

I'm not sure if this is properly speaking a split.

"The type of marking involved. Some languages (including various Austronesian languages of New Guinea, such as Sinaugoro) exhibit an ergative-absolutive pattern with respect to case marking, but a nominative-accusative pattern with respect to agreement."

I believe this is in fact another distinction. In many ergative languages, the verb arguments are marked with erg or abs case as expected but transitive verbs always agree with the subject (that is, intransitive verbs agree with the absolutive argument, but transitive verbs agree with the ergative argument), and word order follows suit, for example noun-ABS intransitive_verb but noun-ERG transitive_verb noun-ABS). Such languages are commonly termed "morphologically ergative but syntactically accusative", and they're not considered a canonical example of split ergativity. IIRC in fact most ergative languages are syntactically accusative. If I'm not making sense, please tell me, but I think this marking-based split is different from the others because it's not orthogonal to morphosyntax. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 01:55, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Animacy hierarchy

It occurs to me that the section about "discourse participants" doesn't properly represent the effect the animacy hierarchy has on the type of split systems exampled by it. Not all splits conditioned by participant animacy are divided between "first and second person pronouns" and "other". Cevlakohn

Accessibility

Has anyone considered whether any of these articles are actually accessible to someone from outside the field...? For instance, the first passage of this article is: "Split ergativity is shown by languages that have a partly ergative behaviour, but employ another syntax or morphology — usually accusative — in some contexts. In fact, most of the so-called ergative languages are not pure but split-ergative." This explanation of the concept is completely useless to someone without a complete knowledge of these definitions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.254.156.65 (talk) 03:51, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

This really needs to be addressed, I have more than a passing interest in languages and this article does little to help the non-expert. Very unlike most wiki arts

Hindi–Urdu

@Itsmeyash31 and AryamanA: Please help me out: is lar̥kā kitāb xarīdā hai really grammatical in Standard Hindi–Urdu? My understanding from all sources (theoretical works and handbooks) I am familiar with is that ergative case is obligatory for transitive subjects when the verb has perfective morphology. I know that there is differential object marking in perfective transitive clauses, but I thought that differential subject marking is restricted to unergative intransitive verbs. –Austronesier (talk) 15:43, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

@Austronesier: As far as I know, the standard grammars consider ergativity to be obligatory (just as you said) however, practically speaking, both are very commonly used and it is more like a preference of one over the other. I doubt any native (independent of whether the person speaks an ergative or unergative hindi variety) would consider either of those sentences to be ungrammatical. In the western varieties, you would hear both the sentences (but more the ergative case) but the eastern varieties do not show ergativity at all, so only lar̥kā kitāb xarīdā hai would be used there. Maybe I should mention this as a footnote in the article, I do have a source for this differencec between Eastern and Wetsern Hindi. Itsmeyash31 (talk) 19:38, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

@Austronesier and Itsmeyash31: It is not grammatical in Delhi Hindi (including my own Hindi) but it is in eastern varieties, just as Itsmeyash said. This is not a type of differential argument marking at play, just the ergative simply doesn't exist the further east you go. The theory put forth by Anne Montaut and others (and I am inclined to agree) is that the ergative ne entered Delhi Hindi from Haryanvi (to the west). Many older Hindi-belt language works don't use any ergative. Aryaman^{A (talk, contribs)} 19:58, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

@Itsmeyash31 and AryamanA: Thank you for the very good explanations! What I suggest is to restrict the basic examples to a single variety, and since we usually take examples from standard Hindustani aka Hindi–Urdu, these should get overall preference. We can then add in a footnote or in a following paragraph that things work differently in the eastern lects. After all, Eastern Hindi varieties are distinct from Hindustani proper, even though there is much interference in periphery of the Hindi Belt due to regular code-switching/mixing. –Austronesier (talk) 20:13, 25 December 2020 (UTC)