Introduction        A dialect is a variety of a language used by group of people whose lexicon, syntax, phonetics and phonology are different from those of other people. The existence of many geographical, economic and social barriers among the speakers of a language cause the emergence of many dialects. As such, each language has many dialects and accents and each dialect has many different ac...

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...

Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world’s languages, with a particular focus...

Introduction It is well known that so-called ergative languages are classified roughly into two groups: those which show an ergative pattern only at the morphological level and those which exhibit an ergative pattern also at the syntactic level. Syntactic ergativity is a curious phenomenon in the following respects. First, while there is apparently some correlation between morphological and syn...

introduction        a dialect is a variety of a language used by group of people whose lexicon, syntax, phonetics and phonology are different from those of other people. the existence of many geographical, economic and social barriers among the speakers of a language cause the emergence of many dialects. as such, each language has many dialects and accents and each dialect has many different ac...

We examine the ban on Ā-movement of the external argument of a transitive verb that holds in many morphologically ergative languages. We argue that the prohibition against movement of the ergative subject should not be derived from restrictions on the movement of the ergative DP. Rather, we suggest that movement of the ergative argument is per se unproblematic, but if it applies, it applies too...