By Grammar, Accusative

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...

'The Prince and Me' - Gramatically it's not correct but it's a movie title. Liberties can be taken with grammar for art's sake. Likewise, 'silly me' is an expression that is not correct grammatically. It would be grammatically correct to say 'I am silly.' but 'silly me' is a lot more...

Milky wrote: <I would be interested to see quotations from the early English grammarians that presented spoken English as somehow inferior, or that demonstrated an imposition of inappropriate rules from Latin. > Do you doubt that was the case? "Doubt" is too strong a word. I would be...

Although I'm a native English speaker, I've often struggled to understand English grammar, especially its morphosyntatical elements. I've done some reading on nominative-accusative as well as ergative-absolutive cases and I just don't get it. Can someone who's better at linguistics explain this...

The noun after the verb is to be in nominative case and not in accusative. I think you mean this to be true in the case of a pronoun after a linking verb only. Taking your "rule" literally, we must have They invited we. because the pronoun is after the verb, the conditions under which...

The various forms of phrasal verbs Phrasal verbs can be transitive or intransitive, separable or inseparable. The object or accusative can in the cases of separable phrasal verbs be placed before or after the particle. With inseparable phrases, the object/accusative is fixed and its position...

Hello GGI feel the English expression "superior to me" comes from a Latin phrase "me superiorem (elder than me)" where "me" is the ablative case of the pronoun for the first person singular but incidentally the same in form as the accusative "me". On the other hand "my superior" might have its...

Mr Pedantic, Truly you deserve the epithet by which you identify yourself. I sensed you were going to put me on the spot this way. Worse still, I know there is every chance that the examples I could furnish (from Gonda or not) won’t convince you. In fact, in a way some of them don’t...

.... -0- ok, let's put it this way: GB is nothing more than a module in the generative grammar, to be put on a par with such other modules of the theory as X', Case theory or the Theta Theory, although it has been quite incorrectly treated as though it were the whole of the Grammar (Chomsky,...