Yes, I think that's what I was thinking of. Sorry, read that years ago and remembered little of it.chris_notts wrote: ↑Sun Dec 30, 2018 3:23 amI've got that book and I completely forgot about the Macro-Jê stuff. I remember reading elsewhere an argument that is has a similar origin to Celtic initial mutations, as an originally phonological change which was grammaticalised as a marker of continuity.
IIRC, in some Oceanic languages, any fully general object (i.e. more indefinite that you'd use an indefinite article for) to an otherwise transitive verb leads to the loss of any transitivity marking on either object or verb. In effect, while the two words remain phonologically distinct, they form a compound lexical item that operates as an intransitive verb.
It seems like in Salish, when lexical suffixes (noun-like suffixes from a closed class) are added to a verb root, in many languages marking (in)transitivity becomes optional where it would have been obligatory with the bare verb root. I guess this makes sense since the lexical suffixes are derivational in nature, and to the extent that speakers can unambiguously interpret the derived stem as having the correct transitivity class, the overt voice markers become redundant.
Yes, it's silly.
Me too! The terms don't even make sense. To me "unaccusative" implies nominative, and the nominative is the typically controlling argument. And "unergative" implies absolutive, which is the typically affected argument. Every single time I want to use them the wrong way round and have to triple check I've got it right. It's a shame they're the established terminology.
I can see why it makes sense, though. The guy who talked about them originally was comparing them not to each other, but to transitives. An unaccusative verb is an accusative verb that's gone wrong (by losing its subject), while an unergative verb is an ergative verb unaccountably lacking its object. But yes, on the typological front, where we tend to be comparing them directly to one another, the terminology seems backward.