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Bruce,

I think we understand something fundamentally different in Sue cooked for an hour and The rice cooked for an hour. (If nothing else, Sue won't dry out from overcooking. She won't burn. And the rice won't get tired.) Calling both intransitive doesn't do justice to the differences. Calling Sue an actor (cooker) and rice a medium, one clause intransitive and the other clause ergative works for me as a way to say that the surface similarities are misleading. I'm not sure how blunt that is. Like much grammar, we don't "see it" entirely on the page. The same would be true for "I mowed all lawns" and "I mowed all days." Until we consult our internal grammar, we would be apt to say they are the same.
I have copies of my book in hand, since Monday; others I'm told are on their way to the states. The stateside distributor is The David Brown Book Co. PO Box 511 Oakville CT 06779. (toll free # 800-791-9354.) It retails for $26.95, and they ask $4.50 for the first book and $1.50 for each one after to cover shipping..
Anyone requesting an inspection copy for possible classroom adoption can do so directly to Equinox Publishing Ltd. ,Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies St. London SW11 2JW, United Kingdom. Their policy is to ask for return of the book in 60 days or payment for it if it doesn't get adopted.
The desk copy request sheet I had at the ATEG conference somehow disappeared during the conference, so anyone who signed up and still wants a review copy (or anyone else) should email me off list.
It is very kind of you to ask.

Craig

Bruce Despain wrote:

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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:
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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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