Craig,

 

This COULD be goal is kind of arbitrary, isn't it?

 

Mary hit the target. (transitive)

Mary hit away. (intransitive)

*The target hit. (could be goal but no "ergative" possible)

I can see that possible ergatives contrast with the transitives, but the existence of an intransitive that somehow deeply involves the goal seems important in making the transition implied in the example.  Is the relationship between the semantics and the syntax even statable in blunt terms?   

 

BTW: I noticed the announcement for your new book.  Am I right to assume that the paperback is not available in the U.S.?

 

Bruce

>>> [log in to unmask] 11/2/2005 7:52:23 AM >>>

Bill,
   My own earlier examples are from the Introduction as well.  I'm not sure, but I think he is setting up "ergative" as a separate category from "intransitive" because he also gives transitive/intransitive pairs. It's possible to give an example of all three.

Mary sailed the boat.  (transitive)
Mary sailed all day.  (intransitive)
The boat sailed.  (ergative)  

Some verbs (like hunted) won't lend themselves to that.  To focus on the lion, we have to make the sentence passive.

The tourist hunted.
The tourist hunted the lion.
The lion was hunted by the tourist.  

The lion hunted represents a changed hunter and has potential goal (tourist) of its own..  

To be ergative, I think you need the notion that the medium COULD be goal in a different kind of rendering. If intransitive, it would definitely be a clear subcategory.

   Traditional categories of transitivity are enormously important, but also unsatisfying in so many ways.  They allow us to classify sentences, but those classifications aren't always a great deal of help (very blunt instruments) when it comes to describing how these clauses represent the world.  His classifications work enormously well in the interpretation (interpretive analysis) of text. I feel that they help me move more deeply into meaning and away from mere observations of form. Students seem to feel that way as well.

Craig

Spruiell, William C wrote:

[log in to unmask] type="cite">

Johanna,

Halliday uses the term "ergative" in a wider sense than it's used in
descriptions of, say, Basque; "ergativesque" might be a better rendering
(open admission: I like Halliday's theory, but don't like some of his
label choices). He deploys it to discuss differences between two
different types of transitive/intransitive verb pairs (examples from 3rd
edition of his _Introduction_, 2004.288):

1.a	The tourist hunted.
1.b	The tourist hunted the lion.

2.a	The tourist woke.
2.b	The lion woke the tourist.

H. describes the relation between 2.a and 2.b as being an ergative one.
The tourist is an Actor in 2.a, and a Goal (to use H.'s term) in 2.b,
"yet it is the tourist who stopped sleeping in both cases."

I think anyone interested in the behavior of English verbs would want to
acknowledge a systematic difference between verbs like "hunt" and verbs
like "wake", and between the intransitive and transitive versions of one
and those of the other; in some ways, this is similar to material in
discussions I've seen on verbal semantics, e.g. Vendler. If you have a
background in anthropological linguistics or native American languages,
"ergative" may seem to be a potentially problematic label, but it
doesn't cause any difficulties internal to the theory.

Bill Spruiell



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