Ergativity: An Introduction

1
Ergativity An Introduction

• We know the use of cases like Nominative and
  Accusative e.g.
• I saw him.
• I nominative case form of 1st singular
• Him accusative case form of 3rd singular
• Even in English, where we dont see it very often
  (only in pronouns), we have the following
  pattern
• Subject Nominative case
• Object Accusative case
• Then we can talk about what is wrong with
• Me saw he.
• Us ate.

2
More Case

• As we saw earlier, some languages like Latin mark
  their nouns for different cases more thoroughly
• Reviewing, note that we can have
• Femina poetam videt.
• woman-NOM poet-ACC see-3s
• The woman sees the poet
• Any order of these words means the same thing

3
A simple point

• Heres an additional point about English and
  Latin
• The subject of an intransitive verb is marked
  with the same case as the subject of a transitive
  verb
• I ate/I saw him.
• Femina poetam videt/Femina cantat
• (as on previous) woman-NOM sings

4
Continuing

• Although English has relatively little
  morphology, on pronouns, there are distinctions
• I saw him Me saw him.
• He saw I He saw me.
• I ran Me ran
• Notice that the subject of an intransitive and
  the subject of a transitive are identical
  objects of transitives are distinct
• Obvious, right? Not really, because not all
  languages work that way.

5
Illustration

• Dyirbal (spoken in Australia)
• Intransitive
• Numa banaga-nYu
• father-ABS return-NONFUT
• father returned
• Transitive
• yabu-Ngu numa bura-n
• mother-ERG father-ABS see-NONFUT
• Mother saw father
• Compare
• Numa-Ngu Yabu bura-n father saw mother
• Important point numa father is in the same
  case in the first two examples
• Follow up The special case in the transitive
  is on yabu mother

6
Terminology

• The cases in languages like Dyirbal (there are
  many) have different names from nominative and
  accusative
• Subject of Intrans/Object of Trans Absolutive
  (usually unmarked)
• Subject of Transitive Ergative
• This kind of case pattern is often referred to as
  Ergative(-Absolutive)

7
Pattern

• One way of visualizing this is as follows
• Abbreviations
• NOM nominative
• ACC accusative
• ERG ergative
• ABS absolutive
• Two types
• Type 1 Type 2
• Subj/Trans NOM ERG
• Subj/Intrans NOM ABS
• Obj/Trans ACC ABS

So type 1 nominative-accusative language, type
2 ergative-absolutive language