Ergativity in Tabasaran: A Reply to Woolford 2015

A reply to DeVico, Lewis & Gallo (2015).

Generative Approaches to Ergativity: Is There an Ergativity Parameter?

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...

Generative Approaches to Ergativity

This paper surveys the principal Generative syntactic analyses which have been proposed for ergativity, found primarily in Inuit, Austronesian, Mayan, and Pama-Nyungan language families. The main puzzle for Generative Grammar is how to analyze the behavior of ergative and absolutive arguments in terms of the grammatical functions of subject and object. I show in this paper that early approaches...

A Problem in Avicennas View on the Origination of the Soul and a Reply to It

Ergativity in Austronesian Languages

Within the Austronesian family, many languages are classified as ergative (e.g., Samoan) or as having some ergative properties (e.g., Tagalog). For one particular language to exhibit some but not all of the characteristics of ergativity is problematic for an ergativity macroparameter. The same issue arises when looking at these languages from an accusative perspective: how do we account for the...