Talk:Ergative verb

No longer redirecting to unaccusative verb

I have stopped this article from redirecting to unaccusative verb, as an ergative verb is not the same thing. I've also written an article (probably a stub) on ergative verbs. I'm still adding to it, and will comment further on this talk page later. Ann Heneghan ^(talk) 16:26, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

I think that some of the information for unaccusative verb and possibly also for ergative verb (in the Wikipedia article before it was redirected) was taken from the website for the University of Utrecht Faculty of Arts.

On that website, the article for Ergative Verbs simply redirects to the entry for Unaccusative Verbs.

It might seem a bit arrogant to disagree with the University of Utrecht, but they don't actually claim that an ergative verb is an unaccusative verb. They simply give no definition of ergative verb at all, and direct the reader to the entry for unaccusative verb – just as on Wikipedia, there is currently no article for Bob Schindler; the reader is instead directed to Terri Schiavo.

My BA in Language Studies with Open University included a wonderful course in grammar. In that course, I studied ergative verbs in detail; I hadn't heard of them before that. I have looked up several comprehensive, scholarly books on grammar, and they all agree with what I learned at Open University.

I decided, therefore, that it would be appropriate to get rid of the "redirect", and to write a new article on ergative verbs. Ann Heneghan ^(talk) 17:13, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

It would be nice to have crosslinguistic examples. As presented, it looks as if they were exclusive of English. Also, if you have references, please cite them in the article (as per Wikipedia:Cite sources; see also Wikipedia:No original research). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 10:29, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Pablo! I saw in the history of the article page that it was you who redirected it, so I meant to leave a note on your talk page saying that I had undone the redirect. Anyway, you found it before I got round to doing that – maybe this page is on your watchlist. With regard to other languages, my (uninformed) guess would be that in the form in which I described the ergative verb, it's a feature of germanic languages. I'll ask a German and a Dutch Wikipedian to have a look at the article to see if they can add any examples. In French, the same effect is produced by using a reflexive verb – he parked the car well; the car parks itself easily; we eat bread with butter; bread eats itself with butter. So it's not produced in the same way. Do such verbs exist in Spanish?

With regard to WP:CITE and WP:NOR, I knew of those two policies, but hadn't actually read either of those pages from start to finish. I'll do so now. I don't think what I wrote could qualify as original research – I certainly didn't make any new discoveries myself. I don't think the actual definition requires any reference. I didn't copy the wording from any book; it was based on what I had absorbed from having read lots of course material and essays and articles that dealt with ergative verbs. I got the categories (change of state, baking, etc.) in Celce-Murchia, M. and Larsen-Freeman, D. (1999) The Grammar Book. Boston. Heinle & Heinle. (I'm sure these categories can be found in many other books, and could also be thought up by anyone who understood what this kind of verb is.) The examples (break, burst, melt, tear, etc.) weren't copied, though there is some overlap. Anyone who knows what an ergative verb is would be able to come up with some examples. The Grammar Book gives the first category – verbs that imply a change of state – with examples, and then says that three other categories are mentioned in Collins Cobuild English Grammar, which I don't have. It proceeds to give the three categories with examples, but gives the credit to Collins. There may well ergative verbs that don't fall into any of those four categories.

Personally, I don't feel there's any real need to give references for my knowledge of what an ergative verb is, since many grammar books explain it, and I wasn't relying on any in particular. Even though I didn't know about them until I took the OU course, it's not something that can be traced to any particular brain, as far as I know, and I used my own words for the definition. The same goes for the categories, but I'm open to disagreement on that. However, when it gets to what I wrote about the significance of ergative verbs – that they allow the text to represent the affected entities as in some way causing the things that happen to them – I do agree that it needs a source. It's probably not an idea that anyone who knew what this verb was would have automatically thought of. The main source is Stubbs, M. (1996) Text and Corpus Analysis. London. Blackwell. However, Stubbs was referring to Halliday, M.A.K. in particular (1985) An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London. Edward Arnold.

I'll read the two articles on Wikipedia policy, and have another think about how much reference needs to be supplied. Feel free to make suggestions. And thanks for adding the category of verbs. I didn't know that existed. Ann Heneghan ^(talk) 18:07, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Dutch examples

As Ann stated, there are Dutch examples as well. This site states a couple of examples: arriveren, barsten, gebeuren, groeien, kapseizen, ontstaan, ontwaken, rimpelen, sneuvelen, stagneren, sterven, struikelen, vallen, verdwijnen, verlopen, verschijnen, verwelken, voorkomen, zinken, zwellen. I think they could be categorised like what was done in the article, but I'm not sure the Dutch categories would be the same. If you need translations of these verbs, more examples, or examples of them in use, or even differences between English and Dutch in this regard, let me know, I'll see what I can find out! --JoanneB 19:05, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Terminology

Where is the notion of "ergative verb" exactly coming from (any references, sources, etc?)? It seems to me that this has not much in common with ergativity. Dixon, 1994: Ergativity calls these verbs ambitransitives (more exactly A=O-ambitransitives) which seems to be a good deal more accurate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.76.168.75 (talk • contribs) 04:29, 11 June 2007 (UTC).

There's another term that's common in the lit, but I can't remember what it is. No one AFAIK calls them "ergative verbs". kwami (talk) 16:27, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

At the risk of saying this whole article is wrong, I don’t know if these are normally thought of as “ergative verbs”. As far as I can tell, they’re all intransitive verbs with lexically causative counterparts. At least that what it seems like for the French and English example (I don’t speak Dutch). In other words “John broke the window” is basically “John caused the window to break”. I'm not an expert on this by any means though. -Alan Trick (talk) 17:51, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

This term, though confusing (if you're familiar with the way ergative is used in regards to morphosyntactic alignment), is standard. See, for example, p. 115 of English Mediopassive Constructions. Also, I'm about to add a relevant link to the article. SgtSchumann (talk) 04:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Though there is something right about saying that ergative verbs "are intransitive verbs with passive meanings", this is also confusing, since as the lead states, an ergative verb "can be either transitive or intransitive" (emphasis mine). An ergative verb is a kind of verb; it is not an inflection or a voice of a verb. Therefore I have removed everything to this effect from the article. I have, however, retained recently added examples. I have also removed links related to ergativity in regards to morphosyntactic alignment, as I think that this only further muddies the waters. (If someone wants to mention in the text that ergative verbs don't have much to do with ergative-absolutive languages and link to these articles within the body of the text, I wouldn't object.) SgtSchumann (talk) 03:54, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Ergativity vs. Unaccusativity

I'm no linguist, so I don't know what causativity (or some other obscure linguistic term) is, or how it affects the classification of verbs as "this" or "that". But I'm having trouble seeing the difference between an ergative verb and an unaccusative verb. How is the ergative example of "I cook the pasta" vs. "The pasta cooks" any different from the unaccusative example of "The sun melted the ice" vs. "The ice melted"? Both articles compare "It broke the window" and "The window broke" in much the same fashion, and I am just not seeing the difference. I know their definitions are different, but I don't quite get how this applies in practice. Is there something I'm missing? Do these two categories sometimes overlap? When do they not overlap? (It would probably be useful to contrast the ambiguous examples in the two articles with very distinct, non-overlapping examples, to demonstrate a clear difference.) NoriMori (talk) 03:06, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't think the problem is with you. As I understand it, break is an ergative verb and not an unaccusative verb. Considering that the page on unaccusative verbs defines an unaccusative verb "intransitive verb whose (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent", this seems to be the consensus of the people who wrote that page as well. I suspect that at some point an editor got the mistaken impression that ergativity is a property of a verb's role, when it is a property of verbs themselves. However, since this entry is about ergative verbs, there's no reason why we shouldn't use break as an example here. -- SgtSchumann (talk) 05:59, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

These terms are restricted to particular theoretical schools. They're more-or-less the same, with slight differences in definition dependent on that theoretical approach. I don't know that any one person uses them both, or contrasts them. kwami (talk) 06:48, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, guys! I mean, neither of your responses really clarified anything for me, but they helped me decide something that I was having trouble with before, which is that I can pretty much use "ergative" and "unaccusative" to mean the same thing. I'll stop stressing about it now. (XD Don't mind me, I'm just conlanging). "...an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose (syntactic) subject is not a (semantic) agent; that is, it does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action of the verb." Still not quite seeing how this is practiceably different from an ergative verb... Oh! I guess the major difference is that an unaccusative verb is intransitive, while an ergative verb can be transitive or intransitive. (Oh, so I can't pretend they're the same...? Darn!) Now that I think of it, I'm actually having trouble seeing the difference between accusativity vs. unergativity... >.< ...Oh. Does the ergativity stuff only apply to ergative-absolutive languages? Could one say that in practice, they're the same, but that their definitions are different because the languages to which they apply have different morphology? P.S. Oh yeah: SgtSchumann, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use "break" as an example; I'm saying that this example, as it appears in both articles, is very ambiguous; and that, if possible, we should add examples that show a more clear difference between ergative verbs and unaccusative verbs. NoriMori (talk) 18:35, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

If ergativity and unaccusativity are the same thing, why do we still have separate articles for them? I'm confused. - furrykef (Talk at me) 02:37, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I love ergative verbs!

I love ergative verbs. I'm actually the main creator of the Wiktionary category (put almost all of its entries in there) (on Wiktionary my name is Language Lover). I just wrote an article about ergative verbs on my blog. Ergative Verbs. Hope you all like it :) Glowing Face Man (talk) 18:17, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Dutch, "ergative verbs" taking "zijn" rather than "hebben"

Dutch is fairly similar to German, and while not having studied Dutch nearly as much as German, intransitive verbs take "sein"/"zijn" automatically. It's hardly surprising that these verbs that can be used intransitively or transitively take "zijn" in the intransitive use. So, I'm not really sure why the article goes out of the way to draw attention to this, like it's something more significant than application of proper Dutch grammar with intransitive verbs. Sure, it looks interesting and significant to English speakers where we lost the use of "be" in intransitive words, but we used to do it as well. "I am come," rather than "I have come." --Puellanivis (talk) 02:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)