Types of ergativity

Legate, Julie Anne

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.10.014

Cited by 25 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Recent work on Dyirbal by Legate (2012) suggests that the parameter in (3) is not universal. It may be the case that syntactic ergativity is not, after all, a homogeneous phenomenon (a theoretical trajectory that mirrors, to some extent, the theoretical treatment of ergativity itself; see, e.g.…”

Section:  Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

Coon¹,

Pedro²,

Preminger³

2014

128

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Many morphologically ergative languages display asymmetries in the extraction of core arguments: while absolutive arguments (transitive objects and intransitive subjects) extract freely, ergative arguments (transitive subjects) cannot. This falls under the label "syntactic ergativity" (see, e.g. Dixon 1972Dixon , 1994Manning 1996; Polinsky to appear(b)). These extraction asymmetries are found in many languages of the Mayan family, where in order to extract transitive subjects (for focus, questions, or relativization), a special construction known as the "Agent Focus" (AF) must be used. These AF constructions have been described as syntactically and semantically transitive because they contain two non-oblique DP arguments, but morphologically intransitive because the verb appears with only a single agreement marker and takes an intransitive status suffix (Aissen 1999; Stiebels 2006). In this paper we offer a proposal for (i) why some morphologically ergative languages exhibit extraction asymmetries, while others do not; and (ii) how the AF construction in Q'anjob'al circumvents this problem. We adopt recent accounts which argue that ergative languages vary in the locus of absolutive case assignment (Aldridge 2004(Aldridge , 2008aLegate 2002Legate , 2008, and propose that this variation is present within the Mayan family. Based primarily on comparative data from Q'anjob'al and Chol, we argue that the inability to extract ergative arguments does not reflect a problem with properties of the ergative subject itself, but rather reflects locality properties of absolutive case assignment in the clause. We show how the AF morpheme -on circumvents this problem in Q'anjob'al by assigning case to internal arguments.

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Section:  Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

Coon¹,

Pedro²,

Preminger³

2014

128

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…(1) Ergative Case Generalization: Even when ergative case may go on the subject of an intransitive clause, ergative case will not appear on a derived subject. (Marantz, 1991:236) As Legate (2012) notes:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Raising to Ergative: Remarks on Applicatives of Unaccusatives

Deal

2019

Linguistic Inquiry

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Applicatives of unaccusatives provide a crucial test case for the inherent-case view of ergativity. If ergative is assigned only to external arguments, in their θ-positions, there can be no “raising to ergative” in applicative unaccusatives; an internal argument subject can never receive ergative case. In this article, I present evidence from Nez Perce (Sahaptian) that this prediction is false. In Nez Perce applicative unaccusatives, the theme argument raises over the applicative argument and is accordingly marked with ergative case. Nez Perce thus demonstrates raising to ergative. Departing from Baker’s (2014) conclusions for similar phenomena in Shipibo (Panoan), I argue that apparently nonlocal movement of the theme in the raising-to-ergative pattern involves not a covert adpositional structure, but rather a response to independently motivated constraints on antilocal movement and remnant movement.

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“…The same is not true of Italian, where PP complements do not seem to count for transitivity in the same way (13). This variation recalls the fact that DP objects with inherent case count for transitivity in some ergative languages, but not others (Legate 2012, Baker 2015, though the interspeaker variation is problematic. For example, in our Catalan survey, 21/57 speakers accepted the dative in (12) and 45/57 the accusative.…”

Section: Pp Complementsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Shared objects in conjoined VPs in Germanic

Sells

2019

The Sign of the V: Papers in Honour of Sten Vikner

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This squib considers the notion of objecthood and its relation to transitivity in a number of Romance and Scandinavian languages and argues that it does not easily reduce to the notion of being nominal. The Romance data come from the faire-infi nitive in Catalan and Italian, where dative causees are found only where the embedded predicate is transitive. The Scandinavian data are from pseudo-passives and expletive-associate constructions, both of which are also sensitive to transitivity. In these contexts, in addition to DPs, (non-nominalised) CPs and PPs can count for transitivity, though this is subject to variation across languages. These patterns present challenges for approaches to objecthood and transitivity based on case/Case, both traditional analyses and more recent dependent case approaches, both of which afford a privileged status to nominals. 1 This paper was inspired by Sten Vikner in three different ways. First, we offer it as a simple token of our respect for him and his work on the occasion of his 60 th birthday. Second, it was directly inspired by the questions he asked at a talk we gave at University of Cambridge on this topic. Finally, it is more generally inspired by Sten's wonderful careful comparative syntactic work which serves as a model of methodical comparison for all scholars of language.

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Types of ergativity

Cited by 25 publications

References 24 publications

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries

Raising to Ergative: Remarks on Applicatives of Unaccusatives

Shared objects in conjoined VPs in Germanic

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