Pronominal orientation is widely argued to be universal component of human languages. Meanwhile, the pronominal system of Philippine languages (henceforth, PL) has always been an obscure subject of investigation. With approximately 150 living languages, the structures of pronominals are just as many. This study attempts to explicate the grammatical functions, along with other known phenomena su...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between information flow and preferred argument structure across different text types. A number of studies in both ergative and accusative languages confirm Du Bois’ (1987) grammatical constrains. Chinese is neither an ergative nor accusative language. The results of my Chinese data do not truly confirm Du Bois’ constraints. Transitiv...

AUTHOR: Mary Laughren AFFILIATION: The University of Queensland ABSTRACT: Very much in the spirit of Goddard (1982), Julie Legate argues in a mkore recent article (Legate 2008) for a distinction in languages such as Warlpiri between a syntactic or abstract nominative and accusative case assignment as opposed to morphological case assignment, although this distinction is only morphologically rea...

While comparison of languages presupposes a common framework neutral to the structures of the languages compared and contrasted, the contemporary grammatical terms and concepts have been developed primarily on the basis of Accusative-type European languages. This has created a great deal of confusion in the universals research. Typological studies in recent years have in part been concerned wit...

Legate (2008) proposes a class of ergative case marking systems, in which sole arguments of intransitives receive nominative case, transitive patients receive accusative case, and transitive agents receive ergative case. The system does not exhibit absolutive as a distinct case. The appearance of a single morphological case on both intransitive sole arguments and transitive patients is due to a...

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...

In ergative constructions, the agent of a transitive verb is in the ergative case and the theme is in the absolutive case. By contrast, in biabsolutive constructions, both the agent and theme of a transitive verb appear in the absolutive case. This paper presents and analyzes the biabsolutive construction in two Nakh-Dagestanian languages, Lak and Tsez. Despite many surface similarities, the bi...

The ergative inflection of Kuuk Thaayorre nouns is remarkably irregular. More than 15 distinct ergative forms are attested, none of which is phonologically predictable. This ergative inflection is also remarkable for its optional use. In spite of its primarily syntactic function, it may also be used to mark pragmatically ‘unexpected’ intransitive subjects, or be omitted where the referent of a ...

To remain theory neutral, we use the abstract labels X, Y, and Pivot to refer to the morphological marking on the external argument of a PV clause, the internal argument of an AV clause, and the sole phrase eligible for A’-extraction in a clause, respectively, throughout the paper. Under the ergative analysis, the external argument of AV clauses (1a) receives structural Case from T (namely, Piv...