Many morphologically ergative languages display asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot. This falls under the label "syntactic ergativity" (see, e.g. Dixon 1972Dixon , 1994Manning 1996; Polinsky to appear(b)). These extraction asymmetries are found in many languages of the Mayan family, where in order to extract transitive subjects (for focus, questions, or relativization), a special construction known as the "Agent Focus" (AF) must be used. These AF constructions have been described as syntactically and semantically transitive because they contain two non-oblique DP arguments, but morphologically intransitive because the verb appears with only a single agreement marker and takes an intransitive status suffix (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006). In this paper we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the AF construction in Q'anjob'al circumvents this problem. We adopt recent accounts which argue that ergative languages vary in the locus of absolutive case assignment (Aldridge 2004(Aldridge , 2008aLegate 2002Legate , 2008, and propose that this variation is present within the Mayan family. Based primarily on comparative data from Q'anjob'al and Chol, we argue that the inability to extract ergative arguments does not reflect a problem with properties of the ergative subject itself, but rather reflects locality properties of absolutive case assignment in the clause. We show how the AF morpheme -on circumvents this problem in Q'anjob'al by assigning case to internal arguments.

This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man , across three age groups (5–6 years, 9–10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the man; Someone made the man laugh ; Someone broke the truck ; ?Someone made the truck break ). The verb-semantics hypothesis predicts that, for all languages, by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by the extent to which the causing and caused event (e.g., amusing and laughing) merge conceptually into a single event (as rated by separate groups of adult participants). The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses predict, for all languages, that by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by, respectively, the verb's relative overall frequency, and frequency in nearly-synonymous constructions (e.g., X made Y laugh for *Someone laughed the man ). Analysis using mixed effects models revealed that entrenchment/preemption effects (which could not be distinguished due to collinearity) were observed for all age groups and all languages except K'iche', which suffered from a thin corpus and showed only preemption sporadically. All languages showed effects of event-merge semantics, except K'iche' which showed only effects of supplementary semantic predictors. We end by presenting a computational model which successfully simulates this pattern of results in a single discriminative-learning mechanism, achieving by-verb correlations of around r = 0.75 with human judgment data.

Researchers using different methods have converged on the result that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Cross-linguistic evidence for the subject processing advantage (SPA) has come mostly from accusative languages, where the covariance of grammatical function and case prevents researchers from determining which of these two factors underlies the SPA. Languages with morphological ergativity allow for the separation of case and grammatical function, since the subject position is associated with two cases: absolutive (intransitive subjects) and ergative (transitive subjects). Prior experimental results on the processing of ergative languages suggest that grammatical function and surface case may be equally important in relative clause processing. On the one hand, as a syntactic subject, the ergative DP has a processing advantage over the absolutive object. On the other hand, the appearance of an ergative serves as a cue for the projection of the absolutive object, which gives processing preference to that object. This paper further tests these findings by examining the processing of relative clauses in Ch'ol and Q'anjob'al, two languages that mark ergativity via agreement on the predicate (head-marking). We address two main questions: (a) does the SPA hold in ergative languages? and (b) are case and agreement equally able to license grammatical functions, and if so, is this reflected in processing? With regard to (a), our results support the SPA, suggesting that it is present in both ergative and accusative languages. With respect to (b), we do not find evidence for a cueing effect associated with the ergative agreement marker. We conclude that dependent-marking is superior to head-marking in tracking grammatical function; in the absence of case cues, universal structural preferences such as the SPA become more pronounced. We also consider and reject a processing explanation for syntactic ergativity, according to which some languages categorically avoid A-bar movement of the ergative with a gap because it imposes a heavy processing load. Our results show that the processing of ergative gaps is not associated with greater cost than the processing of absolutive object gaps; this suggests that an explanation for syntactic ergativity should be sought outside processing.

How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (*The clown laughed the man c.f. The clown made the man laugh), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition research and particularly challenging. Focussing on causative overgeneralization errors of this type, a previous study reported a computational model that learns, on the basis of corpus data and human-derived verb-semantic-feature ratings, to predict adults’ by-verb preferences for less- versus more-transparent causative forms (e.g., * The clown laughed the man vs The clown made the man laugh) across English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche Mayan. Here, we tested the ability of this model (and an expanded version with multiple hidden layers) to explain binary grammaticality judgment data from children aged 4;0-5;0, and elicited-production data from children aged 4;0-5;0 and 5;6-6;6 (N=48 per language). In general, the model successfully simulated both children’s judgment and production data, with correlations of r=0.5-0.6 and r=0.75-0.85, respectively, and also generalized to unseen verbs. Importantly, learners of all five languages showed some evidence of making the types of overgeneralization errors – in both judgments and production – previously observed in naturalistic studies of English (e.g., *I’m dancing it). Together with previous findings, the present study demonstrates that a simple learning model can explain (a) adults’ continuous judgment data, (b) children’s binary judgment data and (c) children’s production data (with no training of these datasets), and therefore constitutes a plausible mechanistic account of the acquisition of verbs’ argument structure restrictions.

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