täîksiri

CONCEPTS

ERGATIVITY

Ergative case marking is one manner in how subjects and objects are treated by a language. The more known manner being Accusative case marking. Both concepts cannot be addressed until transitivity can be understood.

Transitive verbs are those which can have an object of the action. It can be mandatory or optional. 'hit' in English is mandatorily transitive. You can say 'I hit him', or 'I hit the door', but not simply 'I hit'. An example of an intransitive verb, or one that CANNOT have an object of the action is 'to fall'. 'I fall', 'you fall', 'we fell', etc. But you cannot say 'I fall him', or 'I fell the wall'.

Now, back to case marking... Since we have two different kinds of verbs, transitive and intransitive, we want to seperate all the I's and Him's. We want the 'I' of intransitive verbs (fall) to be different from the 'I' of transitive verbs (hit), which are both different from the Him of the transitive verbs. Thus we get the new names:

'I' of the intransitive verb: S - SUBJECT
'I' of the transitive verb: A - AGENT
'Him' of the transitive verb: O - OBJECT

In an Accusative language, both the SUBJECT and AGENT are market with the same case: Nominative. And the OBJECT is marked differently, with Accusative case.
In an Ergative language, the grouping is different. Both the SUBJECT and OBJECT are marked with the same case: Absolutive. And the AGENT is marked differently, with Ergative case.

                          ACCUSATIVE      ERGATIVE   
                          SYSTEM          SYSTEM  
                          +---+           +-------+        
    INTRANSITIVE VERB     | S |           | S     |
                          |   |           +---+   |    
    TRANSITIVE VERB       | A | O           A | O |
                          +---+ ^           ^ +---+
                            ^   |           |   ^ 
                            |   |    ERGATIVE   |
                   NOMINATIVE   |               |
                                |      ABSOLUTIVE
                       ACCUSATIVE

From a semantic point of view, ergativity makes a bit more sense with verbs like 'to fall'. If you think about falling, it is more an action that happens TO you, than it is something you actively DO. Another way to look at this is by using the english Pronouns I, He(S, A) and Me, He(O) as Ergative I, He(A) and Me, He(S, O).


                         INTRANSITIVE              TRANSITIVE
    ACCUSATIVE           I fall.                   I hit him.
                         I.NOM fall.               I.NOM hit him.ACC
    ERGATIVE             Me fall.                  I hit him.
                         Me.ABS fall.              I.ERG hit him.ABS

There are other marking systems, such as Active/Inactive, Split-Ergative, and others, but those wont be explained here.

RELATIVE VERB MARKING

I'm not aware of this type of system in existence in any natural language. The only thing that I believe approaches it is Hungarian definite/indefinite verb markings, and some native american languages, in which some clitic pronouns can be interpreted as subject or object, depending on the presence of other clitic pronouns.

TÄÎKSIRI verbs agree with ABSOLUTIVE case. That is, the Subject of intransitive verbs, and the Object of transitive verbs. But the case marking is relative, and not absolute. We will use the terms CENTRIPITAL, CENTRIFUGAL and STATIVE. The basic concept is that:

CENTRIPITAL person marker signifies that the ABSOLUTIVE person is one step lower than the ERGATIVE person.
CENTRIFUGAL signifies a person one step higher.
STATIVE signifies that the person of ERGATIVE and ABSOLUTIVE are the same.

Since intransitive verbs can't have this relationship (no ERGATIVE), the relative markers have absolute meanings:

CENTRIPITAL = 3rd Person subject (one lower than the person speaking)
CENTRIFUGAL = 2nd Person subject (one higher than the person speaking)
STATIVE = 1st Person subject (same as the person speaking)

With transitive verbs, the situation becomes more complex. Consider the different persons (1st 2nd 3rd) as a system of concentric squares with first person at the center, and 3rd person on the outer ring:

            + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +
            |                                   |
                +----------STATIVE----------+    
            |   |           3-->3           |   |
                |   +-------------------+   |    
            |   |   |       2-->2       |   |   |
                |   |   +-----------+   |   |    
            |   |   |   |   1-->1   |   |   |   |
                |   |   |   + - +   |   |   |    
            |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
                | 3-->2-->1-->3   1-->2-->3-->1
            |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
                | CENTRIPITAL - +   CENTRIFUGAL     
            |   |   |   |           |   |   |   |

                AGENT -------------->> OBJECT

There is an additional inner 3rd person, and additional outer 1st person, which is important to make the system fully functional.

As we remember with transitive verbs, there are two arguments: AGENT and OBJECT. These equate to ERGATIVE and ABSOLUTIVE cases, respectively. Since TÄÎKSIRI verbs encode ABSOLUTIVE case (OBJECT), and the system is RELATIVE, the absolute (semantic) object person is determined from the agent person (ERGATIVE) plus the RELATIVE person affix (CENTRIPITAL, CENTRIFUGAL, or STATIVE). Yes, it's all a bit complex, but some examples should help.

Let's take the sentence 'I hit you'. This is a first person AGENT (I), and a second person OBJECT (You). Thus the RELATION is 1-->2 . From the diagram above, 1 --> 2 is CENTRIFUGAL person. If we were to say 'You hit him', we would use the same relative person marker, because 2 --> 3 is also CENTRIFUGAL. Likewise, 'He hit me' would also be CENTRIFUGAL. And remember, that plurality is also marked, but seperately, so CENTRIFUGAL can also cover 'You hit them', 'He hit us', 'They hit me', etc.

STATIVE person marking covers sentences in which the object and agent are the same person number... like 'I hit myself', and 'He hit them' or 'Bob hit Sally".

VOWEL HARMONY

Vowels in TÄÎKSIRI can harmonize with respect to front and back, and can harmonize for roundness too. When affixes are given containing capital letters, that means that the vowel harmonizes with the root vowel of the word (not necessarily the vowel immediately preceeding/following it).

Affix Vowel	Possible Vowels
	Front		Back
	-R	+R	-R	+R
IU	i	ü	î	u
EO	e	ö	ê	o
I	i		î
U		ü		u
E	e		ê
O		ö		o
A	ä		a

CASES

CASE	general form	definition
ergative	-0	AGENT
absolutive	-A	OBJECT, SUBJECT
dative	-I	"to"
genitive	-E	"from, of"
comitave/instrumental	-lU	"with"
inessive/superessive	-nA	"in, on"
illative/sublative	-nI	"into, onto"
elative/delative	-nE	"from in, from off, out of, off of"
adessive	-ttA	"at, by"
allative (adessive + to)	-ttI	"at, toward, until"
ablative (adessive + from)	-ttE	"from at"

By: Tim W. Talpas, November, 2001
Send Questions/Comments to tim@zece.com