Analysis of Ba Marker in Chinese

Abstract

A large number of linguists have long been interested in ergativity, however ergative languages have long presented a vexing problem for them. The characteristics causing a language to be described as “ergative” is that the intransitive subject is marked in the same way as the transitive object morphologically, while the transitive subject receives a different case marking. Morphological case marking is the original criterion of ergativity. But, later, the term “syntactic ergativity” is used to characterize languages where syntactic phenomena treat the single argument of a verb like ‘run’ in the same way as the patient argument of a verb like ‘hit’, while the agent argument of this two-argument verb is treated differently. What about Chinese? Because scholars claim that in linguistics, Chinese is well known as an isolating or an analytic language which lacks case inflection or verb agreement, it is not morphologically ergative. In this paper, I’ll first discuss Li and Yip’s argument against the analysis of ba as an absolutive marker, then Fujii (1989)’s belief that the entire syntax is centred more or less round the absolutive in Chinese, and finally show that ba as an absolutive marker is unmotivated, rather than ba should be treated as an object marker, sometimes optionally, sometimes obligatorily.