Ergative Marking Research Articles

The semantics of ergative marking in Gooniyandi

The semantics of ergative marking in Gooniyandi

A historical-functional view of the Japanese object marker ‘o’ with intransitive verbs

Summary This paper looks at the occurrence of o with intransitive verb oblique-case arguments and proposes a historical-functional explanation for the meanings of intendedness of the verbal action and total affectedness of the NP signalled by the postposition. The facts that (a) the same employment of the object marker is found in other Uralic-Altaic languages and (b) one or other of the same meanings is expressed in intransitive constructions by both the ergative marker in certain ergative languages and a verbal “extension” in the Bantu language Haya, are shown to support the proposed historical-functional view.

A HISTORICAL-FUNCTIONAL VIEW OF THE JAPANESE OBJECT MARKER o WITH INTRANSITIVE VERBS

Summary This paper looks at the occurrence of o with intransitive verb oblique-case arguments and proposes a historical-functional explanation for the meanings of intendedness of the verbal action and total affectedness of the NP signalled by the postposition. The facts that (a) the same employment of the object marker is found in other Uralic-Altaic languages and (b) one or other of the same meanings is expressed in intransitive constructions by both the ergative marker in certain ergative languages and a verbal “extension” in the Bantu language Haya, are shown to support the proposed historical-functional view.

A note on ergativity, S', and S'' in Karitiana

From the introduction: "Ergativity has long been an important topic in linguistic research, from both a typological (Comrie 1978, Dixon 1979, Plank 1979) as well as a theoretical perspective (Levin 1983, Marantz 1984). The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the discussion of this phenomenon via a study of a fragment of the grammar of Karitiana, an Amazon language, focusing especially on its ergative-absolutive marking of affirmative particles and personal pronouns. The special features of the Karitiana (henceforth K) system are: (1) only absolutive marking need be stated by rule, ergative case being a default mechanism, and (2) K's ergative marking offers interesting evidence in favor of the distinction between topicalization and WH-movement, along the lines first proposed by Chomsky (1977)."

An Ergative Historiography

Summary The most widely accepted definition of ‘ergative’ is in terms of a grammatical case, namely, the subject of a transitive verb, wherein that case is opposed to a second case, the ‘absolutive’ (‘nominative’), which includes both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive. Languages which have been referred to as ‘ergative’ or as containing ‘ergative constructions’ include Basque, Eskimo, most languages from the Caucasus and from Australia, some Polynesian languages, Burushaski, the Paleosiberian languages, Sumerian, Hittite, some Papuan languages, Tibetan, most members of the Indic branch of Indo-European, and many American Indian languages. Insight into speculation on the nature of the ergative leads to a study of the terminology applied before the coinage of the term ‘ergative’ in 1912 (by Adolf Dirr). The term itself has been given varied definitions. Fillmore pictured the ergative as a causative construction; John Anderson suggested ‘ergative’ as a semantic marker; John Lyons describes an ‘ideal ergative’ which is agentive in nature. The bizarre conjecture surrounding the study of ergative languages has included a long debate as to the active or passive nature of the ergative construction and, secondly, the fantasy that an ergative language was a ‘primitive’ one whose speakers had a ‘Weltanschauung’ opposed to that possessed by speakers of a nominative-accusative language. Rather than either active or passive it has also been postulated that the verb is bidirectional and that verb and nouns in some ergative constructions are in a kind of apposition with each other; in addition, these often occur in sets of relationships which are determined by the semantic nature of the nouns and verb. The term ‘semantic ergative’ is suggested here to describe the presence of the ergative marker due to semantic features as +movement, +voluntary, or + emphasis. Although found most commonly as subject of a transitive verb, this semantic ergative may nevertheless also be found as subject of an intransitive.