Typology of Ergativity

Abstract

Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world's languages, with a particular focus on one type of morphological ergativity, namely in case‐marking. While languages are rarely entirely consistent in ergative case‐marking, and the inconsistencies vary considerably across languages, they are nevertheless not random. Thus splits in case‐marking, in which ergative patterning is restricted to certain domains, follow (with few exceptions) universal tendencies. So also are there striking cross‐linguistic commonalities among systems in which ergative case‐marking is optional, although systematic investigation of this domain is quite recent. Recent work on the diachrony of ergative systems and case‐markers is overviewed, and issues for further research are identified.

On the cross-linguistic validity of electrophysiological correlates of morphosyntactic processing: A study of case and agreement violations in Basque

“…Nevertheless, the results of the present study resemble those of previous studies on double nominative markers (Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001Mueller et al, 2005;Mueller et al, 2007). The finding of equivalent ERP signatures engaged in the detection of NP case-marking violations, regardless of whether the language's alignment type is ergative or nominative-accusative, converges with the prevailing view in current Linguistic Theory, that ergativity and accusativity are two grammatical choices in argument-marking, given a common thematic structure (McGregor, 2009;Aldridge, 2008). Whether this conclusion holds across different ergative languages is a question that needs to be addressed in future studies.…”

A grammar of Yakkha

“…In the Yakkha case system, morphological and functional unmarkedness coincide. 14 With the discovery of ergativity, the term 'absolutive' came into use relatively recently to refer to the case of intransitive subjects and transitive objects when these have the same case, see McGregor (2009) andHaspelmath (2009) for summaries of the historical gestation of the term 'ergative'). Since then, research on ergativity has revealed that the system is far from uniform, and optional in many languages, other factors such as reference and information structure playing a greater role than had been expected.…”

Subject preference and ergativity

“…However, in the majority of morphologically ergative languages, the ergative DP has all the criterial properties of a subject: it is the addressee of an imperative, it binds the absolutive but cannot be bound by it, it participates in control and raising, and often it has preferential properties in the control of cross-clausal anaphora (cf. Anderson, 1976Anderson, , 1977Anderson, , 1984Bobaljik, 1993aBobaljik, , 1993bManning, 1996;Legate, 2001Legate, , 2008aAldridge, 2008;McGregor, 2009). …”