By Accusative, Difference between

Hello Dawnstorm,The terminology is not happy, admittedly; "middle voice" and "ergative" belong to other linguistic contexts, as has been mentioned; but I think it can be disentangled. It may be the case that "ergative" usage was once much more common in English....

The problem I see here is a muddle of syntax, pragmatics and semantics.In most of these sentences you could make a case for elided objects, that are taken care off by context (rather than considered irrelevant, as in "I am eating."):e.g. Yes, I saw X. X = anaphoric; referring to...

Imagine a language in which: “The man hit the table with a stick” is “Copoloteko tipadela tisadure asutariki bu.” In this sentence co = a classifier indicating that we are talking about something animate polo = man te = a nominative case marker ko = the speaker wishes to emphasise the...

Hello guysThank you for the replies. All of them are very helpful to me in thinking the problem. I think I had better explain the question more in detail.Actually the questioner asked at first the semantic difference between "He made her sing" and "He told her to sing". So, at first I explained...

Anonymous wrote:"Ergative" is the same as "unaccusative", isn't it?Yes you are right. But the term "unaccusative verbs) like dance, jump, run, talk. The difference between unaccusative and unergative verbs is whether we can take the sentential subject as the real agent or voluntary doer of the...

Hello RohI don't think there is a big difference between the definition that I gave and the one that you gave. When ergative verbs are used intransitively, they are called "unaccusative verbs" (definition by Perlmutter). Unaccusative/ergative intransitive verbs are different from other kind of...

Hello Roro Yeah, you are right. The quantifiers in Japanese behave in very peculiar ways. "Kare-wa sanko-no ringo-wo tabe-ta" is "He ate three apples". "Kare-wa ringo-wo sanko tabe-ta". How would you translate it into English? To me the isolated "sanko" sounds like an adverbial noun. So my try...

??I want that you clean up your room this instant! It would not surprise me to learn that it was possible in some NAmE Englishes. Some Romance language speaking immigrants may speak it. Quote from Everything2 : The Subjunctive Mood of English After verbs which formerly used the...

...whether they just don't fuss about grammar... BrEs on the whole tend to take the Marlon Brando approach to fussing – 'What are you fussing about?' 'What have you got?' – but I'd say that this particular usage (object pronoun + ING) isn't among the more fussed-about. (Which is surprising, in...

Casi Thank you again as usual. As to explaining the difference between the constructs of SVOO and SVO to O, the Chomskian theory is someway persuasive (I have learned the theory through the online resources given by Professor Beatrice Santorini at Pennsylvania University). But I don't think...