Revisiting “Split Ergativity” in Cavineña

When Ergative = Genitive: Nominals and Split Ergativity

While most Mayan languages show an ergative-absolutive pattern of agreement in all main clauses, Chol shows what has been described as an aspect-based split (Quizar and Knowles-Berry 1988; Vázquez Álvarez 2002; Law et al. 2006): perfective clauses show an ergative-absolutive pattern, as in (1), while non-perfective clauses show what appears to be a nominative-accusative pattern, illustrated in ...

Split ergativity in Nepali and its typological significance

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...

Subject preference and ergativity

This paper presents the first-ever processing experiment on relativization in Avar, an ergative language with prenominal relatives. The results show no processing difference between the ergative subject gap and the absolutive object gap. The absolutive subject gap, however, is processedmuch faster. We propose a principled explanation for this result. On the one hand, Avar has a subject preferen...

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...