Talk:Labile verb

message: 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)
thread_title: Dutch examples 

message: 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).
: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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Terminology 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
replies: text:  I am very confused as well. Most sources about Dutch use "ergatief" and "inergatief" to refer to what Wikipedia calls unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. Defining an ergative verb as a verb that is either unaccusative or transitive seems rather contrived, and doesn't seem to reflect actual usage or at least a consensus in usage. If there is no agreement among linguists on which terms to use for which kind of verb, then it seems to me that Wikipedia is endorsing a particular point of view by treating the terms the way it does. I therefore think that Ergative verb and Unaccusative verb should be merged, as should Accusative verb and Unergative verb. CodeCat (talk) 00:02, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ergativity vs. Unaccusativity 

message: 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)
thread_title:  I love ergative verbs! 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Dutch, "ergative verbs" taking "zijn" rather than "hebben" 

message: I'm interested in what seems to me to be the increasing use of ergative verbs in English, primarily in American English, using verbs that used to be simply transitive. For example, Amazon tells its customers that their order has shipped, and printer software tells users that the document is printing. The traditional structure for these meanings would be that the order has been shipped, and that the document is being printed, which are passive structures. The same meaning could also be conveyed more simply with a subject and a transitive verb by saying that 'we have shipped your order' and that 'the printer is printing your document'.
So is this simply economy of phrase, is it laziness, or is it the influence of other languages on English? It certainly seems to be the creation of new ergative verbs, and the original transitive verb is still very much in use.
* I wonder if this is partly due to the relatively recent idea that passive constructions should be (see what I did there? :) ) avoided. I work as a technical writer, and the examples you cite were probably written by trained technical writers. All the technical writing guides urge avoidance of the passive voice (e.g. "The document is being printed"). I understand the reasoning behind this rule: passive constructions can be ambiguous because they don't specify an agent. For example, "When the OK button is clicked" is definitely less clear than, "When you click the OK button." However, sometimes you don't need an agent, and I am quite happy to use the passive voice in such circumstances. Rules are for the obedience of the ignorant, and the guidance of the wise :) That said, I read somewhere that until the 18th Century, the "middle voice" was commonly used where now one would generally use the passive voice - e.g. "The house was building" would have sounded natural to an 18th-century reader, whereas now "The house was being built" is what most people would say. So there appears to be historical precedent for phrases like "The order has shipped."
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.103.43.10 (talk) 20:28, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure this would be considered ergative. It could be a lexicalized passive, but it seems to be a patientive ambitransitive verb. Joeystanley (talk) 14:07, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Increasing use of ergative verbs in English? 

message: Hi All! This is my first time editing a WP page ever, so it's exciting! :)
I suggest that in the first section of the article ("In English"), these two examples be switched in order so that they'll match the order in which they're named in the preceding sentence.
So, switching 
"[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window […]" <-- (infinitive)
"[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window by the burglar […]" <-- (nominalization)
to
"[…] the breaking of the window […]" or "[…] the breaking of the window by the burglar […]" <-- (nominalization)
"[…] to break the window […]" or "[…] for the burglar to break the window […]" <-- (infinitive)
in order to match the order of the labels that are given for these examples in this sentence:
"Unlike a passive verb, a nominalization, an infinitive, or a gerund, which would allow the agent to be deleted but would also allow it to be included, the intransitive version of an ergative verb requires the agent to be deleted:"
(And, out of curiosity, what happens now? If the proposed change is generally accepted, who actually makes the change in the article? Is it expected to be me, since I proposed it, or is there a designated admin that is in charge of making the changes?)
Marybee3 (talk) 16:33, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: You. I doubt anyone will object, since you're making a reasonable stylistic edit. And if they do, they can always revert you. (See the essay at WP:BOLD.) — kwami (talk) 16:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Switching order of examples 

message: As has been noted in the discussions above, there doesn't really seem to be a clear-cut definition between "ergative" and "unaccusative", and "ergative" seems to be used to refer to both concepts. The current definition given on this page seems to mix ergativity (the property of aligning patient with subject) with ambitransitivity (the property of having an optional object). However, I don't think that there is really such a sharp distinction in terminology, or at least I do not believe that this distinction reflects a majority view or common usage. In Dutch linguistics, for example, the standard term for a verb whose intransitive subject is a patient is "ergative", regardless of whether it may also be used transitively. I therefore propose that the two pages be merged and that less WP:UNDUE weight be given to the distinction of having an optional object or not, unless it can be clearly established that this distinction reflects common linguistic usage and not just one particular point of view. CodeCat (talk) 00:13, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge with [[Unaccusative verb]] 

message: The syntactic structures of ergative vs unaccusative sentences in Minimalist syntax are very different. Regardless of the theory, the theta roles involved with each type of verb are very different. See "Core Syntax" by Adger. Aside from unergative verbs like "run", many verbs come in ergative/unergative pairs. e.g. unergative - "The door closed." ergative - "I closed the door." Verbs with ergativity can have agents, but unaccusatives cannot. E.g. the unaccusative verb "fall" in "Mary fell", "Mary" is the theme, not the agent, I also can't say "I fall Mary" to mean that I made Mary fall.  When I have time I will try to return to these pages and make the distinction more clear. Rue-chan (talk) 23:33, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  please don't merge these articles 

message: I've been puzzled for some time about this article as it describes a usage of 'ergative' that I've never come across in any linguistic work. I work with Australian languages so i'm pretty familiar with ergativity as argument structure and case of subject of a transitive verb. I've just found that the Oxford concise dictionary of linguistics does mention the term 'ergative verb' as is used in this article, says it is a sporadic usage that arose in the 1960s, and claims that it appears to have arisen (at least partly) from a misunderstanding of the more standard usage of 'ergative'. The entry finishes with the suggestion that the usage as in this article '...could perhaps with benefit be avoided.' I'm not sure what that means for this article though, but perhaps it should state that it 'ergative verb' is not a term used in mainstream linguistics? Dougg (talk) 04:46, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  The term ergative verb appears in both of my dictionaries of linguistics (Crystal 1997 and Matthews 1997), as defined and explained in this article. I like the term, since it efficiently denotes a type of verb that is in desparate need of a specific designation. --Tjo3ya (talk) 03:36, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Not standard usage in linguistics

message: The current version contains:
”When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant (in this case "the door") undergoes a change of state, becoming, for example, "opened".”
The reference to a door that opened has no introduction in the preceding text.Redav (talk) 13:17, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing introduction of opening door