Deconstructing Ergativity: Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Nominative-accusative And Ergative Are Two Common Alignment Types Found Across Languages. In The Former Type, The Subject Of An Intransitive Verb And The Subject Of A Transitive Verb Are Expressed The Same Way, And Differently From The Object Of A Transitive. In Ergative Languages, The Subject Of An Intransitive And The Object Of A Transitive Appear In The Same Form, The Absolutive, And The Transitive Subject Has A Special, Ergative, Form. Ergative Languages Often Follow Very Different Patterns, Thus Evading A Uniform Description And Analysis. A Simple Explanation For That Has To Do With The Idea That Ergative Languages, Much As Their Nominative-accusative Counterparts, Do Not Form A Uniform Class. In This Book, Maria Polinsky Argues That Ergative Languages Instantiate Two Main Types, The One Where The Ergative Subject Is A Prepositional Phrase (pp-ergatives) And The One With A Noun-phrase Ergative. Each Type Is Internally Consistent And Is Characterized By A Set Of Well-defined Properties. The Book Begins With An Analysis Of Syntactic Ergativity, Which As Polinsky Argues, Is A Manifestation Of The Pp-ergative Type. Polinsky Discusses Diagnostic Properties That Define Pps In General And Then Goes To Show That A Subset Of Ergative Expressions Fit The Profile Of Pps. Several Alternative Analyses Have Been Proposed To Account For Syntactic Ergativity; The Book Presents And Outlines These Analyses And Offers Further Considerations In Support Of The Pp-ergativity Approach. The Book Then Discusses The Second Type, Dp-ergative Languages, And Traces The Diachronic Connection Between The Two Types. The Book Includes Two Chapters Illustrating Paradigm Pp-ergative And Dp-ergative Languages: Tongan And Tsez. The Data Used In These Descriptions Come From Polinsky's Original Fieldwork Hence Presenting New Empirical Facts From Both Languages.