[1] Nominative–accusative languages (including European languages, with the notable exception of Basque) treat both the actor in a clause with a transitive verb and the experiencer in a clause with an intransitive verb in the same way grammatically.
If the two sentences above were expressed in an ergative language, "Max" in the former and "Jane" in the latter would be parallel grammatically.
The verb kharīdī (bought) has the feminine ending -ī, showing gender agreement with the undergoer kitāb (book).
The habitual participle form kharīdatā (buy) has the masculine ending -ā and thus agrees with the agent laṛkā (boy).
This is because the explicator verb gayī (gone) which although undergoes semantic bleaching but still retains its intransitivity which does not allow for an ergative case assignment to the agent argument (i.e., ninā).
This is why as shown in the second example below, VV complexes involving a transitive explicator verb (e.g., phẽkā "threw") can employ ergative case to agent arguments.
'In Columbia River Sahaptin, the split is determined by the person of both subject and object.
The ergative suffix -nɨm occurs only for third-person subjects for which the direct object is in the first or the second person.