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 tend to treat the absolutive uniformly as a subject or an object, while later analyses move toward disassociating case from grammatical function. Descriptively speaking, this paper identifies two types of morphological ergativity, differing in how absolutive case is assigned. Morphological ergativity is also distinguished from syntactic ergativity, which is characterized primarily by a restriction that only absolutives can undergo A’-movement. In other aspects of the grammar, ergativity is not strikingly different from accusativity.