1048: No Subjects in Ergative Languages Oct 22, 2017

Word-order in English is fairly fixed because it needs to be due to a lack of much inflection that other languages like Latin have. This means that as flexible as the order was in English, classifying Latin as being subject-object-verb (SOV) has more to do with conventions than much else. Nevertheless, Latin had subjects at least which makes this sort of classification possible, but not all languages do. Ergative languages like Basque, Mayan, and even a few Indo-European languages like Gorani do not have subjects; instead what would be the subject of transitive verbs (i.e. ones that take a direct object) is called an 'agent' and behaves differently than the argument of intransitive verbs in that the arguments resemble the object of a transitive verbs. Though this is not the same as distinguishing between nominatives and accusatives, a rough English-equivalent, to alleviate confusion, might look like "she reads it" but "her dies". Classifying these languages as SOV (or any other order) is not suitable therefore. This is also not the same as simply dropping off a subject from utterances like in English.