Ergative Verbs Research Articles

An Analysis on Syntactic Derivation of “Patient + Agent + Ergative Verb”

“Patient + Agent + Ergative verb”, in fact, it is a kind of absolutive structure, in which word order and case marking contribute to its formation. It assumes that “Patient + Ergative verb” is the basis syntactic structure, which generates “Patient + Agent + Ergative verb”. And it verifies the hypothesis by checking of light verbs, the characteristics of split-ergativity and Case Hierarchy.

Transitive alternations in Russian: in the case of labile verbs

Labile verbs are verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive. They are divided into A-labile verbs and P-labile verbs. A-labile verb in transitive and intransitive uses has a syntactic argument with semantic role of agent. And the P-labile verb in both uses has an argument with semantic role of patient. As labile alternation is considered as one of the causative alternations, we mainly analyze Plabile verbs in this paper. Labile alternation can occur in the direction from transitive to intransitive verb or from intransitive to transitive. In the first case, labile alternation is accompanied by the omission of agent-subject and the movement of patient to the place of subject. In the second case, it is made by lowering patientsubject to object’s position and adding a new argument-agent to the subject s position. Labile alternation expresses a change of valency, therefore it is directly related to other types of causative alternations, in particular, causative and anti-causative alternations. Since Russian has an anti-causative indicator –sja, in the Russian colloquial occasional labile alternation occurs more often in the causative zone, i.e. the direction from intransitive to transitive.

PEMBENTUKAN VERBA ERGATIF DALAM BAHASA HOKKIEN: KAJIAN MORFOSINTAKSIS

This article is discussing about the formation of ergative verb in Hokkien. A language can be called as ergative if the patient (P) of the transitive verb is treated equally or conferential with the subject (S) in the intransitive clause and is different from the agent (A) of the transitive verb. Ergative verb treats P equally with S. It is usually no indication for both. Accusative sentence is a sentence which has a system where A is equal with S and is different with P. However, active sentence is a type of sentence which shows a group of S which are acting the same with P and a group of S which are acting the same with A in a language.
 In Hokkien, most verbs can be used intransitively, but usually this does not change the subject’s role. For example, “? c?ak m?en pau” (He eats bread) (transitive) and “? c?ak” (He eats) (intransitive), where the only difference is that the latter does not determine what is eaten. By contrast, with ergative verbs, the subject’s role changes; such as “Jack ph?? phua pua” (Jack broke the plate) (transitive) dan “pua phua” (the broken plate) (intransitive).

A Study into the Prototypicality of Chinese Labile Verbs

Trying to situate Chinese into the typology of labile verbs (verbs that may be used transitively or intransitively), this paper analyzes Chinese labile verbals under the framework of cognitive construction grammar. By exhaustively looking at labile verbals in a small corpus, it is found that as an isolating language in which causative (transitive use) or anticausative (intransitive use) is not morphologically marked, Chinese is particularly rich in labile verbals. After estimating how often several target verbals are used transitively and intransitively, two factors grounded in human cognition are revealed determining verbal lability in Chinese: change of state and spontaneity of the event. Change-of-state events give way to two competing profiling strategies, realized as a transitive construction and an intransitive construction, respectively. The degree and direction (transitive-dominated or intransitive-dominated) of verbal lability are sensitive to the likelihood of spontaneous occurrence of the event.

Reflexivity in English, French and Kinshasa Lingala: Similarities and Differences

Dunker [15] asserts that “linguistic reflexivity is a feature of the communication process, and it essentially depends on situated participants and time. It is a defining characteristic of the human language but despite its obvious importance, it is not very well understood theoretically, and it is strangely under-researched empirically”. Reflexivity exists in English, French, and Kinshasa Lingala. In all these languages, reflexivity is expressed by reflexive pronouns, reciprocal pronouns, reflexive verbs, and ergative verbs. The position and use of these pronouns and verbs differ from one language to another. Therefore, this article attempts to examine reflexivity in each of these languages in order to point out similarities and differences. The focus is on the use of reflexive pronouns, reciprocal pronouns, reflexive verbs, and ergative verbs in English, French, and Kinshasa Lingala. This article is based on observation, interview, and contrastive analysis which allows to sort out similarities and differences between languages. Observation was used during people’s talk on buses, at markets, on radios, and in avenues. An interview was prepared for some people in the Kinshasa community especially teachers. The results show that English, French, and Kinshasa Lingala use pronouns to express reflexivity. Reflexivity is expressed through the use of reflexive pronouns which have different positions in these three languages. In English, they occur in the object position. In French, they occur after a personal pronoun subject and before the verb. In Kinshasa Lingala, they occur in the verbal prefix position. As far as reciprocal pronouns are concerned, in English a reciprocal pronoun is used without reflexive pronoun whereas in French, reciprocal pronoun is optional and it is used with reflexive pronoun. In Kinshasa Lingala, the reciprocal pronoun is suffixed to the verb. It is a bound morpheme. Reflexivity is expressed by ergative verbs in English, French, and Kinshasa Lingala. In English, no reflexive pronoun is used with ergative verbs. In French, ergative verb is used with a reflexive pronoun “se”. In Kinshasa Lingala, the ergativity is expressed by the bound morpheme –ma or –mi. In conclusion, the similarities are at the level of the use of reflexive pronouns, reciprocal pronouns, and ergative verbs. Whereas the differences appear in the position occupied by the reflexive components. In English, reflexive pronouns and reciprocal pronouns occur in the object position. In French, they occur between the subject and the verb. In Kinshasa Lingala, the reflexive pronoun occurs in the verbal prefix position. Reciprocal pronoun occurs in the suffix position. Ergativity is expressed by –ma/-mi in the suffix position.

Lability in Andi

This paper deals with the identification of labile verbs in Andi (Nakh-Daghestanian, Russia), and more specifically its methods, results and conclusions for the definition of transitivity in Andi. Lability is traditionally defined as an unmarked valency-changing phenomenon characterizing verbs that can be used both transitively and intransitively without any formal change. Andi happens to feature a combination of three typological characteristics that challenges not only the identification of its labile verbs, but also the application of traditional definitions of lability and transitivity to its context. These characteristics are a radical P-alignment, the absence of any agent demoting or removing morphology, and the possibility for interpreting any unexpressed agent as arbitrary. They are crucial for the analysis of labile phenomena in Andi, because they were shown by D. Creissels to be responsible for a formal ambiguity between 'less labile' passive lability (when a labile verb used intransitively has a passive meaning) and 'more labile' anticausative lability (when a labile verb used intransitively has an anticausative meaning). Several syntactic tests were designed by different authors to distinguish cases of anticausative lability from those of passive lability. These tests involve the semantic interpretation of a reflexive-emphatic pronoun, compatibility with the intransitive imperative in combination with an imperative addressee referring to the nominative argument, and the possibility of the verb being used in an involuntary agent construction. Applied to Andi, these tests show that both anticausative and passive lability concern all transitive verbs, which suggests that they do not differ with respect to their syntactic status and that both involve a change in syntactic transitivity. This conclusion supports D. Creissels's suggestion that in languages sharing with Andi the relevant typological features, transitivity applies not to the predicative constructions themselves, but to their realizations.

The application of ergative verbs to avoid accusations in the translation of Chinese editorials into English

AbstractThe use of ergative verbs results in the agent being backgrounded in an English sentence, and it is often used in the media together with other means such as the use of intransitive verbs, passives, and nominalized nouns to achieve the pragmatic purpose of accusation avoidance. A great deal of research has been done on the role of ergative verbs in media discourse in English as well as the acquisition of ergative verbs by learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, it remains unclear how EFL Chinese learners of advanced levels of competence, such as postgraduates of translation majors and professional translators, use ergative verbs when translating newspaper editorials from Chinese into English. Nor is it clear whether learners have acquired the requisite knowledge of ergative verbs in order to use them effectively so as to avoid blaming the agent of an action or process in translation. This study recruited 30 native Chinese-speaking translators who fell into three categories: undergraduate translators, graduate translators, and professional translators. A small parallel translation corpus was built, which consisted of 150 English translations of 5 Chinese editorials produced by the translators. Accusation-avoidance expressions in the source text and their translations were then extracted and input into an SPSS spreadsheet. The results show that the use of ergative verbs in translations by undergraduate translators is significantly higher than in translations by graduate and professional translators in terms of quantity. The results of the study may be useful for translation teaching and learning.

The Role of Animacy in the Acquisition of Ergative Verbs by Japanese Learners of English

The Role of Animacy in the Acquisition of Ergative Verbs by Japanese Learners of English

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This article is based on two assumptions which have already been evidenced in the literature of environmental discourse analysis. The first is that the normal congruent active material process clause (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), if the empathy hierarchy (Langacker 1991) is imposed upon it, tends to represent humans as acting in a unidirectional way upon a passive environment (Goatly 2002, 2007). The second is that much pro-environmental discourse, such as the Worldwatch Institute’s reports, for the most part adopts this grammar and thereby undervalues the power of nature as a force independent of humans but with power over them (Goatly and Hiradhar 2016). This article builds on work already done in Goatly (2000, 2007) and Goatly and Hiradhar (2016) on non-congruent grammar, co-ordination, along with personification and other forms of metaphor, to represent the human-nature relationship in ways which are more in keeping with modern science, and more helpful from an ecological viewpoint. The poetic texts discussed are taken from Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Edward Thomas’ Collected Poems and Alice Oswald’s Woods etc. Besides the use of grammatical co-ordination and metaphor/literalisation to blur the human nature boundary, they illustrate the use of nominalisations, ergative verbs, the activation of tokens and existents, the emphasis on nature as sayer and experiencer, rather than goal, which is a grammar (and use of metaphor) quite different from the patterns in so-called environmental and news discourse.

Exploring spontaneous-event marking though parallel corpora

English ergative verbs in one-participant constructions such as ‘the door opens’ often correspond to reflexive verbs or -S forms in Norwegian and Swedish. Following Kemmer (1993), such constructions profile spontaneous-event meaning and belong to the middle domain. This study uses corpus methodology to explore spontaneous-event marking in Norwegian and Swedish from the point of view of Kemmer’s suggested two-cycle development path for middle marking in the Scandinavian languages. The results suggest that there are differences in the middle systems in the Scandinavian languages to the effect that Norwegian has completed Kemmer’s two cycles, whereas Swedish has not. Further, there is tentative indication that ergative verbs are on the increase in both Norwegian and Swedish for certain Subjects and in discipline-specific contexts, possibly due to influence from English.

Abstracts of the Chinese papers in English

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.

From the Complex NP Constraint to everything: On deep extractions across categories

AbstractThe article establishes a new generalization concerning domains from which extraction is possible. Taking as the starting point the well-known difference between NPs and VPs regarding extraction, where extraction from Complex NPs is not possible while extraction from Complex VPs is possible, the article argues that the former represents a pervasive pattern found in many contexts, the latter being highly exceptional. More precisely, extraction is impossible not only from clausal but all complements of nouns. Furthermore, it is impossible from complements of prepositions and adjectives as well as ergative verbs. A deduction of the impossibility of extraction from the complements of lexical heads (other than non-ergative verbs) is proposed based on a new approach to phases (i.e. to what counts as a phase) and the Phase-Impenetrability Condition, as well as a particular implementation of

Historical development of labile verbs in modern Russian

AbstractThe article deals with the phenomenon of lability (ambitransitivity), in other words, the ability of a verb to be either transitive or intransitive. I analyze the historical development of verbs which are currently labile in modern Russian. The main group of Russian labile verbs includes verbs of motion. On the basis of corpus and dictionary data, I conclude that the behavior of the lexemes under analysis is far from being uniform. However, interestingly, for most of them, e.g.,In the cases when the intransitive use becomes more frequent, the semantic change matches the statistical one. In the beginning, verbs of this subtype were only used intransitively in a restricted type of contexts (e.g., for

Ergativity in Korean

In this paper I investigate the ergativity in Korean. I argue that the nal-li- type verb is the ergative verb, claiming that the causative suffix is the same as the passive suffix in Korean. The agent can never be the subject of an ergative verb. The differences between Korean ergative verbs and English ones are i) that the former have the (passive) suffixes, whereas the latter have no suffixes at all; ii) the causer can show up overtly with the former, whereas it cannot with the latter. Next, I argue that nal- type verbs are middle verbs, showing that they are very similar to nal-li- type ergative verbs in nature so that the former can be an alternative if the latter are not available. The causer is less likely to show up with the middle verb than the ergative verb, given that the former has no passive suffix added. The nal- type middle verb in Korean is quite different from that in English in i) that it does not describe a property of its subject; ii) it does not need a modifier nor allow only the present tense. Finally I investigate the matter of derivation in ergative constructions, concluding that the ergative/middle constructions are not derived from the causative, or vice versa, with the supporting evidence that the nal-li- type causative and ergative/passive constructions in Korean derived from nal- type middle constructions (or some transitive constructions).

The Äiwoo verb phrase: Syntactic ergativity without pivots

Formal models of syntax typically accord the structural position external to the verb's domain a privileged status in the overall syntactic makeup of a language, either by assuming that external arguments are always S or A, or by linking external argument position to syntactic pivothood. This paper demonstrates that the Oceanic language Äiwoo has an ergative verb phrase – i.e. A as the VP-internal argument and S/O as external arguments – but no corresponding S/O pivot. That is, the ergative structure of the verb phrase in Äiwoo does not entail any syntactically privileged status of the VP-external arguments; rather, it is simply a by-product of various diachronic developments. This situation shows that what has traditionally been perceived as fundamental differences in grammatical organisation – the difference between an accusative and an ergative pattern of VP structure – need not in fact be associated with any broader differences in syntactic or pragmatic structure. More importantly, it goes against the assumption that it is possible to assign universal functions to syntactic configurations. Instead, it can be seen as providing support for the view argued for by Evans & Levinson (2009: 444) that ‘most linguistic diversity is the product of historical cultural evolution operating on relatively independent traits’.

Direct and indirect evidence for lability in Middle Indo-Aryan

The paper is devoted to the labile verbs in the Middle Indo-Aryan languages. To begin with, the general causes of the diachronic development of lability are taken into consideration. The main such cause is suggested to be the casual diachronic deletion of the valency changing morphemes. In this respect, the valency changing verbal morphology of late Sanskrit, along with its outcome at the Middle Indian stage, is taken into consideration. All of the possible sources of ambiguity are identified. Subsequently, it is shown how these ambiguities effectively brought about the creation of labile patterns, which are indeed attested in our sources in MIA languages (namely, literary and epigraphic Prakrits, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Pāli). At the end, some indirect traces of labile verbs in MIA languages are hypothesized through the analysis of the writings of the Pāṇinian grammarians.

Labile verbs in Late Latin

The paper discusses the phenomenon of Late Latin intransitivizations, where a morphologically active form of a transitive verb is used with a middle-passive function. Intransitivizations are present throughout the history of the -language, but their number increases significantly in the 3rd-4th century CE. They are instances of patient-preserving lability and represent one of the possible means to express the anticausative alternation. The analysis casts intransitivizations into the broader context of voice fluctuations in Late Latin, by comparing them with competing constructions and by examining the possible causes for their increase in frequency during the Late Latin stage.

The lure of lability: A synchronic and diachronic investigation of the labile pattern in Estonian

This paper examines the phenomenon of lability in Estonian. We describe the types of lability found in our database and the distribution of verbs according to formal (derivational) and semantic verb classes, and we propose an explanation for the spread of lability in the Estonian verbal lexicon. Estonian displays a wealth of labile verbs, compared with Finnish, for instance, a closely related language which uses similar (derivational and morphosyntactic) valency changing devices. We argue that Estonian lability has been co-conditioned by the following factors: a) intensive contact with German, a language rich in labile verbs, b) fluctuations in the productivity and regularity of the valency-decreasing derivation in the recent history of Estonian, c) the phonetic merger of different derivational suffixes leading to misinterpretation of the valency patterns of their derivatives, and d) form-driven analogy. In relation to the last factor we introduce the notion of “clustered lability,” which designates the expansion of the labile pattern over verbs sharing the same root.

Ergative, antipassive and other verb derivational morphemes in Gaahmg

AbstractGaahmg has ergative traces in a predominately nominative-accusative system. Clauses with object focus demonstrate ergative case marking on postverbal noun and pronoun agents, and an ergative morpheme is also bound to verbs. Other evidence for ergativity is that the ergative morpheme is morphologically and syntactically distinct from the passive morpheme. Ergative morphemes and constructions in Gaahmg are similar to those of other Nilo-Saharan languages, including Luwo, Päri, and Shilluk. The Gaahmg antipassive also resembles that of other Nilo-Saharan languages. Yet, unlike other languages with ergativity and antipassives, Gaahmg readily combines the antipassive with ergative, passive, and causative morphemes in the same verb form. The Gaahmg antipassive occurs in nominative-accusative structures, as well as in object-focus clauses with ergative-absolutive structures. Further, the antipassive co-occurs with the passive, as if both the nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive structures are simultaneously present in the same clause, and the language is currently shifting from one structure to the other.

The decline of labile syntax in Old Indo-Aryan: A diachronic typological perspective

The ancient Indo-European languages, such as early Vedic or (Homeric) Greek, are usually considered to be characterized by a high degree of lability. According to the communis opinio, they had a considerable number of labile verbs or verbal forms that could be labile, cf. rudrah rtasya sadaneṣu vāvrdhuḥ ‘Rudras have grown [intransitive] in the residences of the truth' ~ indram ukthani vāvrdhuḥ ‘The hymns have increased [transitive] Indra'. This paper offers a general overview of the Vedic verbal forms for which labile patterning is attested. I will argue that, for most of these forms, the secondary character of lability can be demonstrated. Thus, for many labile forms with middle inflection (in particular, forms belonging to the present system), labile patterning results from the polyfunctionality of the middle diathesis (self-beneficent / anticausative). The secondary transitive usages of some fundamentally intransitive verbs such as puṣyati ‘prospers; makes prosper' originates from the syntactic re-analysis of content accusative constructions of the type ‘X prospers (in) Y' → ‘X makes Y prosper'. I will further demonstrate that, within the Old Indo-Aryan period, we observe the decline of the labile type. Already in the second most ancient Vedic text, the Atharvaveda, we find very few labile forms. Thus, most of the active perfects which show labile syntax in the Rgveda are either attested in intransitive usages only, or in transitive usages only, or do not occur at all. I will also discuss the main mechanisms of the loss of labile pattern in Old Indo-Aryan.