"ergative case"的定义和意义

What is the "ergative case"?

The ergative case is a grammatical case used to indicate the subject of a transitive verb while marking the object with a different case. This case is found in ergative-absolutive languages, where the subject of an intransitive verb is treated the same as the object of a transitive verb. In languages like Basque and Georgian, the ergative case shows the agent or doer of an action. For example, in Basque, the word for "man" is "gizona," and in the ergative case, it changes to "gizonak" to indicate that he is the subject performing the action in a sentence like "Gizonak emakumea ikusi du," meaning "The man sees the woman." The ergative case helps clarify the roles of subjects and objects in such languages.