#ergativity

Soooo maybe it’s just me

Lingthusiasm Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

When you have a sentence like "I visit them", the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from "they visit me". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or "Laugh me". And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like "laugh" patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb like "visit". This pattern is known as ergativity.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about ergativity! We talk about how ergativity first brought us together as collaborators (true facts: Lingthusiasm might never have existed without it), some classic examples of ergatives from Basque and Arrente, and cool downstream effects that ergativity makes possible, including languages that have ergatives sometimes but not other times (aka split ergativity) and the gloriously-named antipassive (the opposite of the passive). We also introduce a handy mnemonic gesture for remembering what ergativity looks like, as part of our ongoing quest to encourage you to make fun gestures in public!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

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In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistic summer camps for grownups aka linguistics institutes! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Take the Lingthusiasm 2023 survey here!

Lingthusiasm episode 'Colour words around the world and inside your brain'

Lingthusiasm episode 'How to rebalance a lopsided conversation'

'Before we get to ergativity, unaccusitivity and other kinds of morphosyntactic funtimes…' the 2014 blog post by Superlinguo that started Lauren and Gretchen's collaboration

xkcd comic 'Tower of Babel'

Etymonline entry for 'ergative'

Grambank entry 'Feature GB409: Is there any ergative alignment of flagging?'

WALS entry 'Chapter Alignment of Case Marking of Pronouns'

WALS entry 'Chapter Alignment of Case Marking of Full Noun Phrases'

Wikipedia entry for 'ergative–absolutive alignment'

Wikiversity entry for 'A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman) Ergative case'

Wikipedia entry for 'tripartite alignment'

Wikipedia entry for 'antipassive voice'

Wikipedia entry for 'split ergativity'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Word order, we love'

Lingthusiasm episode 'The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

“beware of ergativity”

[Having received some positive feedback for the idea of posting some resources for anyone setting out to learn Tibetan, I thought I’d make a series of really basic introductory posts about core ideas in Tibetan grammar which may be foreign to those learning the language for the first time. I thought this would be a more worthwhile first contribution than beginning with the script for 2 reasons. 1. There are already many fantastic resources re the Tibetan script, and 2. This is also applicable to linguistics and the study of languages more broadly, since by no means are these features exclusively Tibetan. I might come back to the script later, but for now enjoy these very sketchy notes.]