On the distribution of ergative and accusative patterns

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the characterization of the range of noun phrase classes that grammatical rules of human languages make reference to; and, in particular, to the establishment of principles in terms of which ergative-type and accusative-type noun phrase classifications may be predicted for any given rule in any given language. That the noun phrase classification system employed by the grammatical rules of a language does not simply follow the classification system employed by the general case-marking rules of the language in the case of ergative languages has already been shown by previous research. The evidence marshalled in this paper is aimed at showing the same for accusative languages: it is argued that just like ergative languages have both ergative and accusative patterns, accusative languages, too, have patterns of both major types. Some universally or subuniversally predictive hypotheses are proposed that can account for a proper subset of the facts presented about the distribution of the two types of pattern.