I'll try to explain ergative construction today. I owe this to Wheylona, american blogger in Donostia who's trying to learn Basque. Ergativity is a feature of Basque grammar that might be considered odd by speakers of surrounding European languages. However, it's a feature documented by other languages in the world (unrelated to Basque) like Georgian or Chechen, for instance.

OK. Well, ergativity is, as the Wikipedia puts it, this: an ergative language maintains an equivalence between the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb, while treating the agent of a transitive verb differently.

I have read strange examples of how this applies to everyday language. Steven Pinker, well known linguist with a brilliant Chomskyan book, The Language Instict, put it this way: as ergative languages mark the object of an transtitive action (I saw her) the same way as the subject of an intransitive action, therefore they say something like ran her, for she ran.

But both Wikipedia's definition and Pinker's example sound totally alien to me. Ergative construction must look really odd to everybody following that. So, I'll give an example of mine. Perhaps my own explanation will be as strange (and surely not as accurate) as those, but, I'll try anyway.

Wheylona happens to deal with dead bears in her Basque lessons... I'll use a dead parrot, instead. More geek and funny than dead bears, I guess.

It happens that, in Basque, to die and to kill are the same verb. Although there are synonims that do not coincide with both meaning, the most common form hil means both things. That's easy to explain if you speak an ergative language, because murder, at the end, is just transitive death. Or ergative death...

a) Loroa hil da - Parrot-the DIE has. The parrot's dead. More accurately, the parrot has died.

It's easy to transform the decease into a crime:

b) Loroa nik hil dut - Parrot-the I-erg.mark DIE I-have-it. I've killed the parrot.

c) Loroa John Cleesek hil du. Parrot-the John Cleese-erg.mark Die he-has-it. John Cleese has killed the parrot.

-k is the usual ergative marking case. It marks the agent ot the verb.

We may just reverse the actors of the drama:

d) Loroak John Cleese hil du - Parrot-the-erg.mark John Clese DIE he-has-it. The parrot has killed John Cleese.

In accusative language like the ones around us, they tell us, using their accusative logic, that in a) the parrot is the subject, and in c), it becomes the direct object. It is a dead parrot, but somehow, it raises like a zombie from its subject position to occupy a different grammatical niche.

In Basque there are no zombie parrots. The parrot is dead in a), and it's in the same inert and dead position in c), with no declension mark at all neither when it's the alleged subject (a) nor when the indoeuropean linguists declare it to be a direct object (c). What happens is that there's an agent of death now in c), John Cleese, who enters into the scene elegantly dressed in ergative. Why should the parrot have a different grammatical role now? Yet, that's how non-Basque europeans see this: the c)-parrot is not the same as the a)-parrot. Nonsense.

e) Nor hil da? Loroa. Who die has? Parrot-the. Who's dead? the parrot.

f) Nork hil du? John Cleesek. Who-erg.mark die has-it? John Cleese-erg.mark. Who killed him? John Cleese did!

So, what if the parrot committed suicide? Agent and object are the same then... That's easy and logic in Basque:

g) Loroak bere burua hil du. Parrot-the-erg.mark his head-the die he-has-it. The parrot killed his head, that is, the parrot killed himself.

Other Basque verbs also show this behaviour. Sartu: to enter, to put into.

h) Katua etxean sartu da. Cat-the house-the-in enter has. The cat entered into the house.

i) Katua etxean sartu du txakurrak. Cat-the house-the-in enter it-has-it dog-the-erg.mark: the dog has put the cat into the house.

The cat enters in both cases. You poor accusative-thinking indoeuropeans pretend to see a subject in one case, and an object in the other. We see an absolute cat in both cases; absolute being the name of the grammatical case... no mark at all, in contrast to ergative -k marking.

Is it all clear now?