Ergative Pattern Research Articles

Focus in an active/agentive alignment system: the case of Beria (Saharan)

Beria, a member of the Saharan language family, is one of the rare languages in Africa exhibiting both an ergative and an active/agentive alignment system of grammatical relations.1 While the active/agentive pattern is shown by the participant reference markers, the ergative pattern is attested both in the constituent order and in the focus markers on the core constituents. In the pragmatically unmarked constituent order, the Agent constituent precedes the Patient constituent. An unmarked single constituent immediately preceding the verb may represent a Patient or a Subject argument. In this position, the Agent constituent requires the clitic GU. The focused Patient and Subject constituents are both either marked by the clitic DI or by a cleft construction.

Clause Combining, Ergativity, and Coreferent Deletion in Kurmanji

A distinction is commonly made between morphological or surface ergativity, and syntactic or deep ergativity, based on what Dixon has termed the "pivot" behavior (S/A vs. S/O) of a language. Since marked constructions enable an S/A pivot to function even in some deep ergative languages, deep or syntactic ergativity might be interpreted as gradational, depending on the degree to which ergative morphology interferes with the grammar of clause integration and referent coherence. For spoken Kurmanji, a northwest Iranian language with surface ergativity, tentative restrictions on zero-anaphora in conjoined clauses are identified which relate to ergative agreement patterns. These are compared to the distribution of zero-anaphora in other complex constructions involving clause combining. Surface ergativity is found to be one of a variety of factors which may promote re-location of the subject referent in a language in which non-finite structures play a peripheral role, and multi-clause constructions are under pressure to replicate the structure of single proposition clauses.

Preferred argument structure and subject role in American English conversational discourse

Preferred argument structure (PAS) refers to the observed tendency for speakers to avoid expressing more than one lexical argument or more than one piece of new information in a clause, and the tendency to avoid having lexical or new referents in the transitive subject (A) position (Du Bois, 1987). Distribution of new information has been claimed by Du Bois to follow an ergative pattern, in that S, or subject of an intransitive verb, patterns with O, or object of a transitive verb even in non-ergative languages. The present study shows that PAS as formulated above can also be seen to hold for American English conversational discourse. However, the hypothesis of an ergative structuring of discourse is not borne out by my data, as S in general patterns with A rather than O, or the same constraints hold for S as for A. This is hypothesized to be due to the difference in genre, as Du Bois used the Pear Story narratives as data, but above all to the difference in language, as in English the starting-point function has been grammaticized in subjecthood and subjects mainly carry given information (Chafe, 1994). Yet there are some differences in information flow properties between A and S: S is more flexible and tends to accommodate a more varied group of referents and to respond to differences in genre and type of interaction more readily than A.

The semantics of ergative constructions in Zulu and Xhosa

In the African languages the nominative/accusative system is dominant, but these languages also exhibit an ergative case pattern. Both unaccusative and ergative constructions appear in a significant number of verbs in Xhosa and Zulu, as well as in other African languages like Venda and Sotho. This paper investigates these verbs with regard to their predicate argument structure and lexical conceptual structure.

Discourse Pressure, Genre and Grammatical Alignment — After Du Bois

This study adds a genre dimension to the findings of Du Bois (1987) concerning the discourse basis of grammatical patterns. Although Du Bois' and other studies have ascertained that a pressure toward ergative patterning exists even in nominative-accusative languages, I hypothesized that this pressure is a function of narrative discourse, which was the focus of those studies; and that a different genre may motivate a different grammatical alignment as new information is introduced. This study tests the hypothesis in the context of an orally-delivered paramedical training session.

中世ペルシア語の能格構文の特徴について

Middle Persian past sentences are constructed ergatively, i. e. transitive objects and intransitive subjects are coded by the auxiliaries, while transitive subjects are left uncoded.In this paper some characteristics of this ergative construction are presented. These are:(1) there is a split conditioned by tense (aspect) of sentence, (2) the distributional pattern of cases, where they exist, conforms to the ergative pattern, (3) the distribution of subject properties in the present is different from that in the past, and(4) there is a difference in relative clause formation between present and past tenses.