That´s it. When things and items begin to do things on their own that´s my idea of ergativity. But as I said my knowledge on this field is not great.

I have a feeling ergative expressions are usual in children´s talk even in languages which are not using ergative so much. For some reason I see in my eyes a small boy with his toy cars. Or a big boy to that point.

What is so strange about it? Past tense -di attached to a verb gives a different tense and aspect than idi attached to a noun or adjective. V + -di is a finished action, N + idi still continues. Your sentences show this.

Got it now. Thank you, scalpel.

´I have always had a lot of friends (and I still have).´ How can I say it preferably without the part in brackets, just using verb forms?

Sorry, this looks like spamming (acute will react after a while) but I don´t understand the tense of idi when attached to an adjective.

Why don´t you read our gerekmek thread

         http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_52635

sufler? There is some beautiful material there. Maybe it will help you.

I wanted to say this for a long time. (I wonder where I found the courage now.)

This is the bad fruit of nationalism. How come people feel like they have to

         a) admit

         b) deny

Isn´t there a third option:

         c) come on, this was a hundred years ago, I wasn´t there.

I understand what you mean. The usual way to play with the grammatical roles of NP´s is with passive, causative and reflexive marking. Ergative use of verbs is one of the options but not so usual in Turkish (if we want to see it in the narrow sense which I suggested). If we stick to cars

         ?Araba sürdü

would be the most impressive example of ergativity. I´m not sure if it is possible.

I recently bagged some examples of Turkish sentences which I found in texts and which in my opinion seemed ergative but I can´t find them now in my files. I´ll add them here when they kindly pop up from somewhere.

But if there are two verbs (ok, with the same stem) and their action in the sentence is different, I think they are two and not one. I think your last example tells something about English ergativity rather than Turkish. In English there is stop and stop but in the Turkish variants syntactic governance is carefully marked in the verbs.

So you think bitmek and bitirmek are the same verb. Basically they are, of course, but wouldn´t it be clearer to talk about underived stems when we discuss ergativity? I mean, playing with passive, reflexive and causative we can turn the NP roles upside down in the sentence anyway.

I always had trouble in understanding the concept of ergativity and I was glad I didn’t really have to deal with it. It seems that everything I thought I have once abandoned I find in front of me while studying Turkish.

Ok, here we go.

I have noticed two types of verb stems in Turkish what comes to the role of subject and object:

Some non-derived stems are transitive (bulmak) and some are intransitive (bitmek) by nature. Usually if we want to change the status of the object of the transitive verb we need to undress the verb from its transitivity by adding passive or reflexive. Ergative use is an exception of this principle.

Maybe I misunderstand something but I thought ergative use needs a transitive stem (the second type). If the object of bulmak was risen to the position of subject without deriving the basic verb any further -  I don’t know if it ever could  -  it would be ergative use, right?

Ergative use according to its narrowest definition is like the use of the verb translate in the English sentence

The sentence translates…

Thus, from the mentioned examples

Makarna pişiyor

İstemez (in the meaning ‘I don’t want it’ )

represent ergative use of transitive verbs at its purest.

There are a lot of intransitive stems but I have understood ergativity can happen with only certain types of transitive verbs (introduced by tunci under the above link) and it is more usual in English than Turkish.

Correct me.

         Kendimi bildim bileli çok arkadaşım var.

If I put vardı there instead would it mean that I don´t have friends any more? And what influence does the adverbial have on the meaning: if there was none

         Çok arkadaşlarım var

would I be talking about present moment only or is any past included?