The genitive with verbs denoting ‘to fill’: partitive or ergative?

When Ergative = Genitive: Nominals and Split Ergativity

While most Mayan languages show an ergative-absolutive pattern of agreement in all main clauses, Chol shows what has been described as an aspect-based split (Quizar and Knowles-Berry 1988; Vázquez Álvarez 2002; Law et al. 2006): perfective clauses show an ergative-absolutive pattern, as in (1), while non-perfective clauses show what appears to be a nominative-accusative pattern, illustrated in ...

Property-Denoting NPs and Non-Canonical Genitive Case

In this paper, I discuss the semantics of certain instances of non-canonical genitive Case in Russian. I use the term non-canonical genitive Case to refer to the phenomena whereby an object of the verb is assigned genitive Case, rather than accusative. More specifically, I discuss two phenomena: Genitive of Negation and Intensional Genitive. The paper is organized as follows. First, I introduce...

Local Case, Cyclic Agree and the Syntax of Truly Ergative Verbs

In this paper, I argue that German shows a phenomenon formally akin to an ergative split. While transitive verbs as in (1a) show a NOM/ACC case pattern with the external argument marked nominative and the internal argument marked accusative (cf. 1b), it can be shown that with reflexively marked anticausatives as in (2a) the nominative theme is base-generated in a position c-commanded by the acc...

Partitive Case and Aspect

Current theories make a distinction between two types of case, STRUCTURAL case and INHERENT (or LEXICAL) case (Chomsky 1981), similar to the older distinction between GRAMMATICAL and SEMANTIC case (Kuryłowicz 1964).1 Structural case is assumed to be assigned at S-structure in a purely configurational way, whereas inherent case is assigned at D-structure in possible dependence on the governing p...

The Acquisition of Ergative Languages