Deconstructing Ergativity

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.