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This chapter proposes a diachronic account of VOS and SVO word-order variation in Austronesian languages. I argue that the ‘S’ argument in VOS languages is a topic which moves to an A'-position in the left periphery of the clause. Movement of the topic is followed by fronting of the remnant TP to a higher position in the CP layer. The change to SVO word order results from the loss of TP fronting. Subsequent to this, the clause-initial topic is reanalyzed as an A-position subject. I show that the ‘S’ arguments in SVO Austronesian languages have characteristics of both A-position subjects and A'-position topics, providing evidence for the direction of change from topic to subject.

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This article surveys the principal generative syntactic analyses that have been proposed for ergativity, found primarily in Inuit, Austronesian, Mayan, and Pama-Nyungan language families. The main puzzle for generative grammar is how to analyze the behavior of ergative and absolutive arguments in terms of the grammatical functions of subject and object. I show in this article that early approaches tend to treat the absolutive uniformly as a subject or an object, while later analyses move toward disassociating case from grammatical function. Descriptively speaking, this article identifies two types of morphological ergativity, differing in how absolutive case is assigned. Morphological ergativity is also distinguished from syntactic ergativity, which is characterized primarily by a restriction that only absolutives can undergo A'-movement. In other aspects of the grammar, ergativity is not strikingly different from accusativity.

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