The Origin of Agent Markers

Comments on Austronesian nominalism: A Mayan perspective

“…Kaufman notes that in languages with ergative-marking, we often find syncretism between the ergative and another ''peripheral case'' (Dixon 1994;Palancar 2002). In ergative languages where we find a syncretism between ergative and genitive cases, ergativity is proposed to have arisen from a reanalysis of a nominalization structure (Manning 1996).…”

Typology of Ergativity

“…This grammaticalisation pathway is evidently motivated by metaphorical transfer (Heine, et al 1991): the target domain of agency is represented in terms of a source spatial domain, namely source/origin, agents being conceptually the source or origin from which activity emanates. The other sources mentioned above, genitives, locatives, and instrumentals, are readily explained in similar ways, and it is not difficult to find languages where they represent plausible historical sources of ergatives (see further Palancar 2002: 224–228). Proposals such as these are founded on observed polysemies in case‐markers on the one hand, and on the other on the assumption that grammaticalisation proceeds from concrete to abstract senses.…”

“…These include ablatives, genitives, locatives, and instrumentals (e.g. Palancar 2002). Thus in Basque and Trumai, there is an evident formal similarity between the ablative and the ergative markers.…”

Optional ergative case marking systems in a typological-semiotic perspective

“…Stolz, 1996;Palancar, 2002Palancar, , 2008, where it basically refers to polysemies in case-markers. As in traditional approaches to inflectional morphology, I use the term in reference to the circumstance in which the marking of two separate cases that are normally accorded different markings in a language is the same, and when this is not grammatically conditioned.…”