Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations

I wish to present a codiication of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages and argue for the correctness of one particular approach, which I will call the Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis. 1 I presume familiarity with the termèrgativity', but, brieey, many languages have ergative case marking, such as Burushaski in (1), in contrast to the accusative case marking of Latin in (2). More generally, if we follow Dixon (1979) and use A to mark the agent-like argument of a transitive verb, O to mark the patient-like argument of a transitive verb, and S to mark the single argument of an intransitive verb, then we can call ergative any subsystem of a language that groups S and O in contrast to A, as shown in (3). (1) a. ne the.masc h re man-erg phall o seed.pl.abs bb ok-i sow.pret-3sg.masc. subj`The man planted the seeds.' b. ne the.masc hir man.abs yy alt-i yawn.pret-3sg.masc. subj`The man yawned.' (2) a. puella girl.nom veni-t come-pres.ind. 3sg`The girl comes.' b. puer boy.nom puella-m girl-acc audit hear-pres.ind. 3sg`The boy hears the girl.' Absolutive 1 This paper is drawn from my 1994 Stanford dissertation of the same name (copies of which are available from