CONSTANT FEATURES OF ERGATIVE LANGUAGES

The Acquisition of Ergative Languages

split-ergative morphology in hindi/urdu, pashto & balochi languages

this research is designed to produce detailed descriptions of the morphological ergativity in three south asian languages. the chosen sample includes hindi/urdu, pashto and balochi, as morphologically enough to achieve the goals and generalizations of the research. the study presents the range of variation in case and agreement marking in these south asian descendants of the common indo-iranian...

Features of Architecture Description Languages

The characteristic approach in mature engineering disciplines (e.g. civil and chemical engineering) is to build systems (e.g., buildings or chemical plants) from known solutions such as proven designs and existing components [Shaw90,D’Ippolito89]]. Engineers in mature disciplines also put great emphasis on proactively avoiding costly problems by evaluating the system before it is built [Liu87]....

Approximately Independent Features of Languages

To facilitate the testing of models for the evolution of languages, the present note offers a set of linguistic features that are approximately independent of each other. To find these features, the adjusted Rand index (R) is used to estimate the degree of pairwise relationship among 130 linguistic features in a large published database. Many of the R values prove to be near 0, as predicted for...

Interlanguage Ergative Constructions and Learnability

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 ...