Revisiting “Split Ergativity” in Cavineña

Abstract

Cavinena, an ergative language spoken in Amazonian Bolivia, has a very intriguing pronominal system where, notably, a pronoun coding a transitive subject can either have a full “ergative” form or a reduced form that makes it look like an “absolutive” pronoun (used to code an intransitive subject or a transitive object). Camp (1985) describes the system as an instance of “split ergativity” conditioned by the difference between main and subordinate clause, the mood/polarity of the clause, the constituent order, and a person hierarchy. The phenomenon of split ergative systems was first discussed in the 1970s (by Dixon 1972; 1979, Silverstein 1976, and Comrie 1978, among others) and this certainly influenced Camp’s “split ergative” analysis. The goal of this paper is to reevaluate Camp’s analysis in the light of new findings about the coding of grammatical functions in this language. It is shown that the peculiarities of the Cavinena pronominal system can be accounted for in a more elegant explanatory and typ...