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In grammar, an ergative verb is a verb that can work two ways without changing its shape. In one sentence somebody does the action to a thing: He cooked the potatoes. In the other, the same thing is the subject, and we do not say who did it: The potatoes cooked quickly. The potatoes are the thing that gets cooked in both lines. Open, break, melt, sink, close, and a lot of “change of state” verbs work like this in English. Teachers also call them labile verbs. The word is technical; you will see it in grammar books, not in the market. Though actually, linguists also use ergative for a different fact in some languages (how the “” of a verb is marked). That is not this school sense. Here it only names that two-way English verb pattern.
作格動詞（語法；指同一動詞可帶受詞，也可讓受詞當主詞）
組成From Ancient Greek ἐργάτης (ergátēs, “worker, labourer”) + English -ive (“of that kind”).
同家族的字
- energyfrom the same Greek stem for work (ἔργον)
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
ergativeadj/ˈɜːɡətɪv/
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grammarhuman-scienceslinguisticsWith the subject of a transitive construction having grammatical cases or thematic relations different from those of an intransitive construction.
- The case systems of ergative languages are counter-intuitive to speakers of many Indo-European languages.
- The most common situation is for nouns to inflect according to a nominative-ergative pattern, while pronouns at least superficially follow a nominative-accusative pattern. That is, nouns have a single case (nominative) marking intransitive subject and transitive object functions, and another case (ergative) for transitive subject function.
ergativenoun/ˈɜːɡətɪv/
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grammarhuman-scienceslinguisticsAn ergative verb or other expression.
- Unlike those with subjectivized ergatives, such locative clauses naturally do not allow for imperatives (*Contain the apples).
- Woodbury (1975) does argue, however, that absolutives are more relativisable in Greenlandic than are ergatives, on the grounds that (1) RCs [Relative Clauses] formed on ergatives are somewhat more restricted in the distribution in matrix clauses (p. 21) than are those formed on absolutives, and (2) for certain verb classes ergatives cannot be relativised out of the active participle (p. 27).
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。