Split ergativity

Split ergativity

Split ergativity is shown by languages that have a partly ergative behaviour, but employ another syntax or morphology — usually accusative — in some contexts. In fact, most of the so-called ergative languages are not pure but split-ergative.

The split is usually conditioned by one of these:

# The presence of a discourse participant (a first or second person) in the proposition. The Australian language Dyirbal behaves ergatively in all morphosyntactic contexts, except when one of these is involved. When a first or second person pronoun appears, however, it is marked according to a nominative-accusative pattern (with the least marked case when it is the agent or intransitive, and with the most marked case when it is the patient). This can be explained in terms of the high animacy of a first or second person speaker in the animacy hierarchy.
# The use of certain tenses and/or aspects in the verb. The Indo-Iranian family, for example, shows a split between the perfect and the imperfect aspect. A verb in the perfect aspect causes its arguments to be marked using an ergative pattern, while the imperfect aspect triggers accusative marking. (Related languages and others always tend to associate past tense and/or perfect aspect with ergativity.)
# The type of marking involved. Some languages (including various Austronesian languages of New Guinea, such as Sinaugoro) exhibit an ergative-absolutive pattern with respect to case marking, but a nominative-accusative pattern with respect to agreement.
# The agentivity of the intransitive subject. In languages like Dakota, arguments of active verbs such as "to run" are marked like transitive agents, as in accusative languages, while arguments of inactive verbs such as "to stand" are marked like transitive objects, as in ergative languages. Languages with this kind of marking are known as split-S languages, and are formally a subtype of active languages.

Examples

An example of split ergativity conditioned by tense and aspect is found in the Hindi-Urdu language, which has an ergative case on subjects in the perfective aspect for transitive verbs in the active voice, while in other aspects (habitual, progressive) subjects appear in the nominative case. Example sentences for Hindi-Urdu are:

:लड़का किताब ख़रीदता है:"unicode|laṛka kitāb xarīdtā hai":boy.Msg.NOMINATIVE book.NOMINATIVE.Fsg buy.HABITUAL.Msg be.PRESENT ¹:"The boy buys a book."

:लड़के-ने किताब ख़रीदी:"unicode|laṛke-ne kitāb xarīdī":boy.Msg-ERGATIVE book.NOMINATIVE.Fsg buy.PERFECTIVE.Fsg ¹:"The boy bought a book."

::"(¹) The morph-by-morph analysis has been simplified to show the features relevant to the topic of split ergativity."


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • Split-Ergativität — Ergativsprachen sind danach charakterisiert, wie in ihnen die Argumente des Verbs (Subjekt und Objekt) gekennzeichnet sind. Sie unterscheiden sich darin von Akkusativsprachen und den Aktivsprachen. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1 Morphologische Ergativität… …   Deutsch Wikipedia

  • Ergative-absolutive language — An ergative absolutive language (or simply ergative language) is a language that treats the argument ( subject ) of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb but distinctly from the agent ( subject ) of a transitive verb. Ergative …   Wikipedia

  • Nominative–accusative language — Nominative accusative alignment Linguistic typology Morphological Isolating Synthetic …   Wikipedia

  • Morphosyntactic alignment — Linguistic typology Morphological Isolating Synthetic Polysynthetic Fusional Agglutinative Morphosyntactic …   Wikipedia

  • Georgian grammar — The Georgian language belongs to the South Caucasian or Kartvelian family. Some of its characteristics are akin to those of Slavic languages such as its system of verbal aspect, but Georgian grammar is remarkably different from Indo European… …   Wikipedia

  • Balochi language — Balochi بلوچی baločî Spoken in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, UAE, Oman Native speakers 7.0 million  (1998) Lan …   Wikipedia

  • Mayan languages — Maya language redirects here. For other uses, see Maya language (disambiguation). Mayan Geographic distribution: Mesoamerica: Southern Mexico; …   Wikipedia

  • Romance languages — Romance Geographic distribution: Originally Southern Europe and parts of Africa; now also Latin America, Canada, parts of Lebanon and much of Western Africa Linguistic classification: Indo European Italic …   Wikipedia

  • Linguistic typology — is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world s languages. It includes three subdisciplines: qualitative… …   Wikipedia

  • Tzeltal language — Tzeltal Bats il K op Spoken in Mexico Region Chiapas Ethnicity Tzeltal Native speakers 372,000 …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”