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...

X.1 The introduction The Inuit language is often characterized as an ergative language (Bok-Bennema 1991; Manning 1996; Johns 1992, 2000, 2006, among others). Interestingly, the Inuit language exhibits a case assignment variability which, unlike traditional split ergativity, does not affect argument alignment, but instead concerns what – and how many – arguments trigger φ-feature agreement on f...

In her recent stimulating book NICHOLS (1992) suggests that there are no correlations between word order type and morphological alignment, where by alignment is meant the patterns of argument marking in mono-transitive and intransitive clauses, e.g. accusative, ergative, active, tripartite, hierarchical and neutral. Her findings pertain to the relationship between word order type and the domina...

This paper has as its aim to connect two seemingly disparate phenomena: the structure of Basque adpositional phrases and the synchretisms arising in plural DPs between ergative and absolutive arguments in some of the dialects of Basque. This synchretism, which can be found in western and central dialects of Basque, resolves in favour of absolutive marking, and has been taken to be the product o...

To remain theory neutral, we use the abstract labels X, Y, and Pivot to refer to the morphological marking on the external argument of a PV clause, the internal argument of an AV clause, and the sole phrase eligible for A’-extraction in a clause, respectively, throughout the paper. Under the ergative analysis, the external argument of AV clauses (1a) receives structural Case from T (namely, Piv...

for the western iranian languages the transition from the old iranian to the middle-iranian period is characterised by – among other things – the loss of word-final syllables. this loss had a far-reaching impact on the nominal and verbal systems since it caused the loss of categories which had been expressed by suffixes. the consequences include the emergence of the so-called ergative system. ...

This paper considers the notorious Double Nominative Constructions (DNCs) found in Korean, and argues that these constructions are derived from a locative construction. Based on Freeze (1992) and Perlmutter (1978), I will show that the derivation in Korean DNCs is the same as that found in English possessive, existential and locative sentences (see Fillmore (1968), Kuno (1971) and Lyons (1967) ...