The Ergative Morphosyntax in Danuwar

The Acquisition of Ergative Languages

Basque clitics in morphosyntax*

This paper addresses the question of φ -feature marking in Basque. Basque finite verbs display an uncommonly large number of morphemes which covary with the φ -features of the absolutive, ergative, and dative arguments as well as (in some dialects) the gender of the addressee. Recent work (Preminger 2009; Arregi & Nevins 2012) has addressed the question of how these morphemes are derived. In ta...

The Ergative System in Balochi from a Typological Perspective

For the Western Iranian languages the transition from the Old Iranian to the Middle-Iranian period is characterised by – among other things – the loss of word-final syllables. This loss had a far-reaching impact on the nominal and verbal systems since it caused the loss of categories which had been expressed by suffixes. The consequences include the emergence of the so-called ergative system. ...

LFG and Morphosyntax

Interlanguage Ergative Constructions and Learnability

A certain group of English verbs, the ergatives, is consistently mis-passivized in Chinese-speakers' interlanguage. Comparison of the ergative construction in Chinese and English shows that they share similar properties. However, this does not seem to facilitate learning of the target English construction. Furthermore, the passive ergatives are not attributable to exemplification in either the ...