Ergative languages make up a substantial percentage of the world’s languages. They have a case system which distinguishes the subject of a transitive verb from that of an intransitive, grouping the latter with the object — that is, the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb are in the same case, which we refer to as the nominative. However, ergative languages differ...

The goal of this paper is to outline the core of a new minimalist analysis of accusative vs. ergative patterns of argument encoding (via case marking or agreement). The central observation is that indeterminacies may arise in the application of the two elementary operations Merge and Agree (see Chomsky (2000, 2001)), given that they both obey an Earliness requirement (see Pesetsky (1989)); and ...

In recent years, there has been new and growing interest in ergativity among researchers working within the generative framework. This two-part lecture describes the basic facts about so-called ergative languages and then examines the existing approaches to ergative case assignment (Lecture 1) and syntactic ergativity (Lecture 2). Our main objective is to explore whether ergativity can be shown...

The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in each language. In Lajamanu Warlpiri, pronominal cl...

The resulting denominal verb (dv) has the full syntactic and morphological distribution of any verb in West Greenlandic. It also retains some of the properties of the incorporated nominal (in), which has led some researchers to analyze this construction as a kind of ni and to argue that it represents a structural mismatch between syntax and morphology. In this paper, I will present an alternati...

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...