LINGUIST List 4.358

Tue 11 May 1993

Qs: Ergativity & Agreement, Addresses, US Rankings

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1. , Case/Agreement Ergativity
2. Y.L. TANG, E-mail addresses
3. "Sze-wing Tang", rankings

For the purposes of this query,let's define 'ergative' as an adjective
denoting any linguistic process which groups together transitive
objects (or 'P') with intransitive subjects (or 'S'), distinct from
transitive subjects (or 'A'). Naturally, 'accusative' will be used
for processes which group together S and A distinct from P. Clearly,
many other linguistic systems besides case marking may be described in
this way as ergative or accusative, in particular verbal agreement
morphology.

There are many well known languages which have accusative case-marking
and accusative verbal agreement: English, Italian, and Hungarian, to
name a few. There are also languages which have ergative case-marking
and ergative verbal agreement, for instance Basque and Avar. Also,
there are languages with "mixed" systems of ergative case-marking and
accusative verbal agreement: Warlbiri and (at least in the aorist)
Georgian.

Now, here's my question: does anyone know of a language which has
*accusative* case-marking and *ergative* verbal agreement? Any
information would be helpful, whether the language in question has
explicit morphological case or the expanded notion of 'Case-marking'
which subsumes word-order information.

If there is any response I will summarize for the net.

Thanks,
John O'Neil

Dear everyone,

Does anyone know the e-mail addresses of the following persons? :-

Norman Fairclough, Lancaster University, UK
Gunther Kress, Professor of Communication, University of Technology, Sydney,
 Australia

Thanks in advance!

Raymond Y.L. TANG
Department of English
University of Hong Kong

Can anyone help me, as someone living outside America, in obtaining
up-to-date educational rankings information (top 30) on undergraduate
as well as graduate programs for linguistics in the States? It would
be good if you could indicate the source of your information.
Thank you in advance.

Sze-wing Tang <swtangcuhk.hk>