A typological study of the clause structure of ergative languagesAbstract: This paper presents a typological study of the clause structure of ergative languages by examining a sample of 78 languages. It focuses on three structures, namely (the alignment of case marking and verbal person marking of) the core argument structures, the antipassive constructions, and the ditransitive constructions.In this study, “ergativity” refers both “ergative” languages and the “active” languages. In particular, 75 languages in the sample are the “ergative” or “active” ones in Comrie (2013a, 2013b) and Siewierska (2013a), three languages not labeled as ergative or active in Dryer & Haspelmath (2013), namely Dyirbal, Kham, and Tibetan, are also included. The features of core argument structures, antipassive constructions, and ditransitive constructions are collected from Dryer & Haspelmath (2013) and various other literature.This study adopts a customary typological approach and proposes sixteen (groups of) universals or tendencies of morphological and/or syntactic features of ergative languages on the basis of frequency analysis, most of which in the form of implicational universals. To list but a few: (I) Most (if not all) ergative languages are split in alignment; (II) Ergativity is more commonly found in the case marking of full noun phrases than in pronouns (which prefer accusative alignment); (III) Ergative markers are more commonly found on the As, but accusative markers on the Ps; (IV) The alignment of case marking of the full noun phrases or pronouns cannot be predicated by verbal person marking, although most ergative languages prefer to have person marking of both A and P; (V) The languages with “mixed object construction” (Haspelmath 2013) are found in various alignment types, although there are close relationships between ditransitive constructions and ergative alignment; (VI) There is no close relationships between antipassive/passive constructions and ergativity; on the contrary, ergative languages show a considerably low ratio of both constructions.In the light of this study, this paper dispels the ergativity myth in Mandarin Chinese. It proposes that the so-called Chinese ergative constructions, e.g. ergative verbs, the ba construction, are invariably unaccusative in nature.