In her recent stimulating book NICHOLS (1992) suggests that there are no correlations between word order type and morphological alignment, where by alignment is meant the patterns of argument marking in mono-transitive and intransitive clauses, e.g. accusative, ergative, active, tripartite, hierarchical and neutral. Her findings pertain to the relationship between word order type and the domina...

One potential challenge for children learning Inuktitut comes from the ergative case marking system, because of the contrast between the ergative system in morphology and the accusative system governing syntax. However, no studies have yet been published focusing on how Inuktitut-speaking children acquire ergativity. In this chapter, we investigate this process using naturalistic spontaneous sp...

Practically in all examples found in the literature, the oblique intervener Y in (1) is an argument marked with dative Case, either a dative indirect object (e.g. Romance) or a dative subject (Icelandic, Basque). Could the intervener be ergative? Under current received accounts of ergativity, this is predicted to be impossible. For simplicity we demonstrate it for H=v: In some theories of ergat...

Abstract This study presents new data on the bi-absolutive construction in Chechen, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken northern Caucasus. The basic case frame transitive clause Chechen is ergative-absolutive. In progressive constructions with an auxiliary and simultaneous converb, alternates absolutive-absolutive – or construction. To assess factors conditioning this alternation, we use from t...

In Case, Mark Baker develops a unified theory of how the morphological case marking of noun phrases is determined by syntactic structure. Designed to work well for languages of all alignment types – accusative, ergative, tripartite, marked nominative, or marked absolutive – this theory has been developed and tested against unrelated languages of each type, and more than twenty non-Indo-European...

Ergative case, the special case of transitive subjects, raises questions not only for the theory of case but also for theories of subjecthood and transitivity. This paper analyzes the case system of Nez Perce, a ”three-way ergative” language, with an eye towards a formalization of the category of transitive subject. I show that it is object agreement that is determinative of transitivity, and h...

extended abstract 1. introduction nowadays kurdish language is often divided to 3 main groups: 1-the southern group consists of several incongrous accents that are spoken in the sout of iranian kurdistan. 2-the central group consists of iraqi northeastern kurdish, kurdistan of iran and the adjacent areas around it and called surani. 3-northern kurdi wich is the language of more than ⅔ of kurdis...

Languages group verbs in different ways. Because of the ergative feature Zazaki, it plays a big role whether are transitive or intransitive. Zaza Language introduces some pronouns to distinguish double-transitive from and intransitive verbs. In linguistic works, terms used synonymously. This article aims scrutinize ditransitive constructions language, which has interesting syntactic elements th...

1 INTRODUCTION. If inflectional morphology were perfectly straightforward, a listing of the inflected forms of a word for a given language would at the same time give us a list of the morphosyntactic values relevant for that language. For example in Yir-Yoront (1), a Pama-Nyungan language from the Cape York Peninsula, Australia, the distinct forms displayed by such words as 'foot' or 'leg' just...