> I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour Oh, I completely agree

> I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more. [0] http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativity-handbook.pdf http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativi... > It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)