The ergative construction in modern Indo-Aryan

Abstract

The ergative construction is found in widely distributed and structurally diverse languages in both hemispheres (e.g. North Amerindian, Basque, North and South Caucasian, Palacoasiatic, Tibetan, Indo-Aryan, and Polynesian). In all these it presents certain common features, viz. the transitiveness of the verb; the ergative, agentive, or instrumental case ( casus activus) of the logical subject; and, in contrast to this, the object of the verb in the nominative case, or casus passivus, which is the characteristic of the logical subject of an intransitive verb. Indo-Aryan (Indic) uses the ergative construction with verbal forms containing or derived from the past participle passive, but in view of the presence of the nominative construction in the rest of the paradigm of conjugation, it is not normally conceived as passive. The passiveness of the verb in the ergative construction however is, from the standpoint of interpretation, a reasonable and useful assumption, and the ergative case is best reported by instrumental prepositions or the instrumental case, where this exists. Indeed the English passive construction, with its logical subject in the by-form, is the simplest approach to the ergative.