The two languages i focus on in this thesis are the philippine language tagalog and the formosan language seediq. Ergativity and verbinitial word order in austronesian languages. Generally, arguments are classified into three types. All ergative languages are verbperipheral, or have free word order. Ergativeabsolutive languages, or ergative languages, are languages that share a certain.
The objectives of this chapter is to illustrate the diversity of the phenomena in which ergativity is manifested and to address some questions that are relevant to the current study. Verbinitial word orders, primarily in austronesian and mayan. Woolfords goal is not to provide a detailed technical account of how ergative case and other. Pdf subject preference and ergativity researchgate. Verbinitial word orders, primarily in austronesian and. Cornell university 2004 this thesis proposes a minimalist analysis of ergativity and word order in the austronesian languages tagalog and seediq. As it turns out, quite a few languages use ergativity. Her book aspects of split ergativity was published by oup in 20. The relationship between morphological ergativity and ergative extraction restrictions is shown in table 1.
Ergativity, tendency of a language to pair the subject, or agent, of an intransitive verb with the object, or patient, of a transitive verb. Word order makes it difficult to tell in these languages. Beginning with tongan, in transitive clauses with two dp arguments, both vso 15a and vos 15b order is allowed. This generaliza tion was perhaps first noticed by trask 1979 and subsequently. Syntactic ergativity is also referred to as interclausal ergativity, as it typically appears in the relation of two clauses. Coon quotes that australia, the caucasus, the americas, new guinea, south asia, and the austronesian family as hotbeds of ergativity comrie 2011 p. However it is necessary to remember that word order constituent order and semantics are useful to help distin. Sumeriangrammarlesson seven ergativity in sumerian. Du bois is professor of linguistics at the university of california, santa barbara. A read is counted each time someone views a publication summary such as the title, abstract, and list of authors, clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the fulltext. However it is necessary to remember that word order constituent order and semantics are. A specialist in functional linguistics, discourse, mayan languages, and sociocultural linguistics, his work centers on the interaction between discourse and grammar.
Chair of the department of linguistics and cognitive science. Sumerian, like most languages with ergative features, is actually splitergative, meaning that sometimes sumerian uses ergative cases, and sometimes it uses the familiar subjectobject cases. Verbinitial word orders, primarily in austronesian and mayan languages lauren eby clemens university at albany, state university of new york, usa maria polinsky university of maryland, usa 1 introduction 1. Pdf split ergativity and word order in chorti robin. Dixons longstanding interest in the topic, and in particular from his seminal 1979 paper in language. Ergativity and word order in austronesian languages. In languages that are predominantly vos, the ban on abar extraction of the transitive subject arises because of a blocking effect of the kind proposed by aldridge 2008, coon et al. Ergativity and causativity publish your masters thesis.
Chapter two provides arguments for taking contrastive word order in chinese as the primary syntactic diagnostics for ergativity in this language and explores the unergativeergative alternations with regard to word order variations. Note that the word subject, as it is typically defined in grammars of. Pdf this paper presents the firstever processing experiment on relativization. He fused the lights and the lights fused have equivalent. Of or relating to a language, such as georgian, in which the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are expressed by. We use cookies to offer you a better experience, personalize content, tailor advertising, provide social media features, and better understand the use of our services. Word order for example, the absolutive argument comes before the verb and the ergative argument comes after it syntactic pivots. The oxford handbook of ergativity oxford university press.
While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has made it more and. Ergativity and transitivity ellen woolford ergative case is said to mark transitive subjects, and it is widely assumed that this is true under the ordinary definition of transitive. She provides a brief summary to historical and functional. Ergativity and causativity regina mannle term paper advanced seminar english language and literature studies linguistics publish your bachelors or masters thesis, dissertation, term paper or essay. This contrasts with the situation in nominativeaccusative languages such as latin or english, in which the subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs. Review of aspects of split ergativity language in india. Section 3 shows that balinese has constructions similar to the syntactically ergative constructions in dyirbal. Chapter 2 ergativity chapter 2 overview of ergativity ergativity is a term that refers to a certain pattern that some languages show in treating arguments of a verb.
In hindi, sometimes a verb agrees with its object, not with its subject. Deconstructing ergativity top results of your surfing deconstructing ergativity start download portable document format pdf and ebooks electronic books free online rating news 20162017 is books that can provide inspiration, insight, knowledge to the reader. The clear implication is that morphological ergativity and this type of syntactic ergativity cannot be con. If the verb is transitive and the verb is a perfect or perfective form and the verb requires ergative alignment most verbs do, ill explain. She finished her phd at mit in 2010 and then spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at harvard university. Ergativity and word order in samoan child language elinor ochs university of southern california a study of the acquisition of ergative casemarking ecm in samoan indicates that it rarely appears in the speech of24 year old children. Trask draws this broad distinction between ergative languages and nominative languages which include english. Verbinitial word orders, primarily in austronesian and mayan languages 3 0002910536. This volume fills that void by focusing on some of the basic issues. Download ergativity pdf book pdfbooks this volume presents a collection of papers on the enticing and complex theme of ergativity. However, its extremely uncommon for a language to be completely ergative.
Ergativity 657 languages,includinginuitlanguagessuchaswestgreenlandicbittner1994andinuktitutjohns1992,austronesianlanguagessuchasniueanseiter1980. Jun 28, 2006 download ergativity pdf book pdfbooks this volume presents a collection of papers on the enticing and complex theme of ergativity. Includes approaches from a range of theoretical viewpoints. Use nitros industryleading pdf to word converter to create better quality doc files than the alternatives. Review of aspects of split ergativity ergativity is found in onequarter languages of the world. Dixon here provides a full survey of the various types of ergativity, looking at the ways they interrelate, their semantic bases and their role in the organisation of discourse. Abstract ergative case is said to mark transitive subjects, and it is widely assumed that this is true under the ordinary notion of transitivity, where all and only clauses with a direct object in syntax are transitive. Our pdf to word converter then wipes out any copies of your file from our server, keeping your data safe. The oxford handbook of ergativity jessica coon, diane massam, lisa demena travis this volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. Chapter 2 overview of ergativity university of hawaii. In this respect, the account derives an apparent case of split ergativity without resort to. As any quick survey of the syntactic literature will show, there are almost as many different views of ergativity as there are socalled ergative languages languages whose basic clause structure instantiates an ergative casemarking or agreement pattern.
Michael yoshitaka erlewine, theodore levin, coppe van urk to appear in a forthcoming oxford handbook of ergativity. In this paper we argue that there are two different kinds of syntactic ergativity attested across mayan languages. Chapter 2 ergativity words, there seems to be some correlation between morphological ergativity and syntactic ergativity. Avar word order in the root clause is relatively free, with sov. In section 5, i will present my analysis of these languages and show how syntactic ergativity can be explained in.
The oxford handbook of ergativity edited by jessica coon, diane massam, and lisa demena travis oxford handbooks. Roughly, ergative languages focus their articulation on the agency of the utterance, while nominative. Discusses historical, semantic, and discoursebased motivations for ergativity and problems posed for theoretical work on ergativity. Another family of accounts of syntactic ergativity likewise analyzes the ergative as an inherent case licensed in spec,v, but relies on locality conditions to prevent the ergative dp from undergoing amovement. Word order variation our primary reason to adopt the approach to case assignment and syntactic ergativity outlined above comes from word order differences in these two closely related languages. In english a nominativeaccusative language, the subject of a sentence with a transitive verb and the subject of a sentence with an intransitive. Syntactic ergativity polinsky major reference works. Jessica has worked on topics including ergativity, split ergativity, verbinitial word order, and agreement, with a special focus on mayan languages. Ergative definition at, a free online dictionary with pronunciation, synonyms and translation. Ergativity and word order in austronesian languages edith catherine aldridge, ph. In an ergative language such as basque or georgian, but not english, ergative is the grammatical case that identifies the noun phrase as the subject of a transitive verb. Ergativity in discourse and grammar oxford handbooks. Split ergativity pdf, archived from the original pdf on 20412, retrieved.