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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...