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 ...

Abstract This paper employs phylogenetic modeling to reconstruct the alignment system of Indo-European. We use a data set categorical morphosyntactic features, which take states such as ‘nominative-accusative’, ‘active-stative’, or ‘ergative’. analyze these characters with standard Bayesian comparative method, inferring transition rates between character on basis representation languages in dat...

This paper discusses ergative case assignment in Hindi and its interaction with aspectual verb complexes or complex predicate constructions. It is shown that ergative case is assigned by the last head in the aspectual verb complex and that ergative case on the subject of intransitive verbs denoting bodily-functions is associated with a counter-to-expectation meaning. It is then shown that aspec...

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 ...

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...

The paper deals with the typology of the case marking of semantic core roles. The competing economy considerations of hearer (disambiguation) and speaker (minimal effort) are formalized in terms of evolutionary game theory. It will be shown that the case marking patterns that are attested in the languages of the world are those that are evolutionary stable for different relative weightings of s...