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Academic literature on the topic 'Nouns and ergatives'
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Journal articles on the topic "Nouns and ergatives"
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Fernández, Beatriz, Fernando Zúñiga, and Ane Berro. "Datives with psych nouns and adjectives in Basque." Folia Linguistica 54, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 647–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/flin-2020-2050.
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Abstract This paper explores the formal expression of two Basque dative argument types in combination with psych nouns and adjectives, in intransitive and transitive clauses: (i) those that express the experiencer, and (ii) those that express the stimulus of the psychological state denoted by the psych noun and adjective. In the intransitive structure involving a dative experiencer (DatExpIS), the stimulus is in the absolutive case, and the intransitive copula izan ‘be’ shows both dative and absolutive agreement. This construction basically corresponds to those built upon the piacere type of psychological verbs typified in (Belletti, Adriana & Luigi Rizzi. 1988. Psych-verbs and θ-theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6. 291–352) three-way classification of Italian psych verbs. In the intransitive structure involving a dative stimulus (DatStimIS), the experiencer is marked by absolutive case, and the same intransitive copula shows both absolutive and dative agreement (with the latter corresponding to the dative stimulus and not to the experiencer). We show that the behavior of the dative argument in the two constructions is just the opposite of each other regarding a number of morphosyntactic tests, including agreement, constituency, hierarchy and selection. Additionally, we explore two parallel transitive constructions that involve either a dative experiencer and an ergative stimulus (DatExpTS) or a dative stimulus and an ergative experiencer (DatStimTS), which employ the transitive copula *edun ‘have’. Considering these configurations, we propose an extended and more fine-grained typology of psych predicates.
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Luo, Tianhua. "Abstracts of the Chinese papers in English." Chinese as a Second Language Research 4, no. 2 (October 1, 2015): 295–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/caslar-2015-0016.
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A typological study of the clause structure of ergative languagesAbstract: This paper presents a typological study of the clause structure of ergative languages by examining a sample of 78 languages. It focuses on three structures, namely (the alignment of case marking and verbal person marking of) the core argument structures, the antipassive constructions, and the ditransitive constructions.In this study, “ergativity” refers both “ergative” languages and the “active” languages. In particular, 75 languages in the sample are the “ergative” or “active” ones in Comrie (2013a, 2013b) and Siewierska (2013a), three languages not labeled as ergative or active in Dryer & Haspelmath (2013), namely Dyirbal, Kham, and Tibetan, are also included. The features of core argument structures, antipassive constructions, and ditransitive constructions are collected from Dryer & Haspelmath (2013) and various other literature.This study adopts a customary typological approach and proposes sixteen (groups of) universals or tendencies of morphological and/or syntactic features of ergative languages on the basis of frequency analysis, most of which in the form of implicational universals. To list but a few: (I) Most (if not all) ergative languages are split in alignment; (II) Ergativity is more commonly found in the case marking of full noun phrases than in pronouns (which prefer accusative alignment); (III) Ergative markers are more commonly found on the As, but accusative markers on the Ps; (IV) The alignment of case marking of the full noun phrases or pronouns cannot be predicated by verbal person marking, although most ergative languages prefer to have person marking of both A and P; (V) The languages with “mixed object construction” (Haspelmath 2013) are found in various alignment types, although there are close relationships between ditransitive constructions and ergative alignment; (VI) There is no close relationships between antipassive/passive constructions and ergativity; on the contrary, ergative languages show a considerably low ratio of both constructions.In the light of this study, this paper dispels the ergativity myth in Mandarin Chinese. It proposes that the so-called Chinese ergative constructions, e.g. ergative verbs, the ba construction, are invariably unaccusative in nature.
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Dong, Dahui, and Mu-Li Yang. "The application of ergative verbs to avoid accusations in the translation of Chinese editorials into English." Lingua Posnaniensis 60, no. 1 (June 1, 2018): 17–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/linpo-2018-0002.
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Abstract The use of ergative verbs results in the agent being backgrounded in an English sentence, and it is often used in the media together with other means such as the use of intransitive verbs, passives, and nominalized nouns to achieve the pragmatic purpose of accusation avoidance. A great deal of research has been done on the role of ergative verbs in media discourse in English as well as the acquisition of ergative verbs by learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, it remains unclear how EFL Chinese learners of advanced levels of competence, such as postgraduates of translation majors and professional translators, use ergative verbs when translating newspaper editorials from Chinese into English. Nor is it clear whether learners have acquired the requisite knowledge of ergative verbs in order to use them effectively so as to avoid blaming the agent of an action or process in translation. This study recruited 30 native Chinese-speaking translators who fell into three categories: undergraduate translators, graduate translators, and professional translators. A small parallel translation corpus was built, which consisted of 150 English translations of 5 Chinese editorials produced by the translators. Accusation-avoidance expressions in the source text and their translations were then extracted and input into an SPSS spreadsheet. The results show that the use of ergative verbs in translations by undergraduate translators is significantly higher than in translations by graduate and professional translators in terms of quantity. The results of the study may be useful for translation teaching and learning.
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Flinn, Gallagher. "Georgian stem formants and nominalization." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 2 (June 12, 2017): 47. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4092.
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The Georgian verb system is complex, and in many cases the function and meaning of certain morphemes is not entirely clear. One such morpheme, the stem formant, appears in both non-perfect verbs and nominal structures. Although they are usually associated with aspect in the verb, I propose that there are several advantages to treating stem formants as nominal heads bearing the feature [+collective]. If stem formants are nominalizers, then several facts about their distribution can be explained, including their historical origin, their presence in abstract and verbal nouns, and their absence from verbs which assign ergative case to their subjects. Doing so also makes it possible to bring Georgian split ergativity closer in line with other analyses of ergative splits in Basque (Laka, 2006) and Chol (Coon, 2013)
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Duguine, Isabelle, and Barbara Köpke. "Processing strategies used by Basque-French bilingual and Basque monolingual children for the production of the subject-agent in Basque." Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9, no. 4-5 (October 9, 2019): 514–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lab.16047.dug.
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Abstract We sought to describe the strategies used by 2L1 and L2 Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque. Based on a three-year longitudinal study, the analysis focused on transitive constructions requiring a subject-agent noun marked for ergative case. The results showed that the children mastered production of the ergative case marker at different ages, and used different psycholinguistic strategies to refer to the subject-agent. The majority of the bilingual children favoured topological strategy (i.e., marking of the subject-agent in the first position through subject-verb-object word order). However, the children with L1 Basque seemed to engage more in morphological strategy, through the use of the nominal ergative suffix. These data allowed us to discuss variations in the performance of bilingual children in light of the cue cost and cue validity concepts elaborated by the Competition Model applied to language production.
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Rafay Khan, Abdul, and Ghazala Kausar. "Case Valuation in Transitive Clauses: A Comparative Study of Punjabi and English Syntax." Linguistics and Literature Review 7, no. 1 (March 26, 2021): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.32350/llr.71.01.
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Case is a morphological realization on a noun phrase (NP) to represent the NP's grammatical relationship with the main verb of the clause. With respect to case, languages, in many cases, can be broadly divided into two alignment systems, i.e., ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative. In the former type of languages, e.g., Punjabi, the subjects usually receive an ergative post position in transitive clauses (with perfective aspect) while in the latter type of languages, e.g., English, the subject, i.e., in nominative case receives, no post position. There has been a widespread controversy on whether ergative is a structural case or a lexical/inherent case and how the arguments are, i.e., subject and objects valued case in case of ergative clauses. With this ongoing debate in the background, this study aims to compare the marking of case on the arguments, i.e., subjects and objects in the transitive clauses of English and Punjabi. The study is conducted under the minimalist framework of Chomsky (2008), who emphasized on Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT): language provides the best possible solution to the interface conditions imposed by other systems of the human mind, i.e., related to meaning and sound, which interact with language through their interfaces Conceptual Intentional (C-I) and Sensori-Motor (SM) respectively. In this framework, a feature valuation mechanism is induced by the probes, i.e., C and v*. The study finds that in split ergative languages (the languages which take both case patterns, i.e., nominative and ergative) like Punjabi, the EA, i.e., subjects of perfective transitive clauses are assigned the ergative case by the functional heads v* at [Spec-v*] while the IA, i.e., objects are valued accusative case by the same functional head v* under Agree operation. A consequence of this finding concludes that T has default agreement in such languages, which is possible because Punjabi (like its other South Asian counterparts, e.g., Urdu-Hindi, Bengali, and Kashmiri) is a pro-drop language. So, it is easy to assume that EPP and Agree features of T are an option
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Kahnemuyipour, Arsalan, and Diane Massam. "Deriving the order of heads and adjuncts: the case of Niuean DPs." ZAS Papers in Linguistics 34 (January 1, 2004): 135–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.34.2004.208.
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This paper examines substantive noun phrases in Niuean, a Polynesian language of the Tongic subgroup with VSO word order, isolating morphology, and an ergative case system. We describe the allowable orderings of elements in the Niuean noun phrase, which include certain variations in the placement of numerals and the genitive possessor, then we provide a phrasal movement analysis for these variations, treating first the possessor variation, then the numeral variation. Parallels will be drawn between the derivation of nominal and sentential word order.
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Schrijver, Peter. "The Verbal Syntax of Hattian." Altorientalische Forschungen 45, no. 2 (November 28, 2018): 213–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/aofo-2018-0019.
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Abstract There is much controversy over the question of the syntactic alignment of Hattian. A resolution is complicated by the fact that Hattian has a poor case morphology. This investigation into the functions of the prefixes waa= and eš= (with various allomorphs), which occur both as plural prefixes to nouns and as verbal prefixes expressing third person plural actants, attempts to resolve the issue on the basis of a detailed study of the relevant material. As it turns out, Hattian has a split system, with an accusative base in verbal forms that do not contain the prefix tu= and an ergative base in verbal forms that do contain that prefix. Intransitive subject, transitive subject and object are all morphosyntactically distinguished, so that it can be argued that Hattian has a split three-way system of alignment. This complicated system is typologically similar to alignment in Sumerian.
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McGregor, William B. "Missionary linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia." Historiographia Linguistica 35, no. 1-2 (March 7, 2008): 121–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.35.1-2.07mcg.
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Summary This paper explores the contribution of missionary linguists to the documentation, description, and maintenance of Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia from the establishment of the first enduring mission in 1890 to 1960. It is argued that the primary contribution was to language documentation. However, the descriptive contribution was not negligible, and many missionary linguists struggled intelligently with the descriptive challenges confronting them (ergative case-marking, noun-class systems, compound verb constructions, etc.). Rather than being rigidly bound by the Latinate model, they modified it in various ways (usually not explicitly discussed), including by using traditional terminology in novel ways.
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Pooth, Roland, Peter Alexander Kerkhof, Leonid Kulikov, and Jóhanna Barđdal. "The origin of non-canonical case marking of subjects in Proto-Indo-European." Indogermanische Forschungen 124, no. 1 (September 18, 2019): 245–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/if-2019-0009.
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Abstract For a long time one of the most bewildering conundrums of Indo- European linguistics has been the issue of how to reconstruct the alignment system of this ancient language state, given the lack of distinction between s and o marking in the Proto-Indo-European neuter nouns and the problem of the Hittite ergative. An additional complication stems from the existence of argument structure constructions where the subject(-like) argument is marked in a different case than the nominative, like the accusative or the dative. Our aim with the present article is to fill two needs with one deed and offer a unified account of this century-long bone of contention. In contribution to the ongoing discussion in the field, we claim that a semantic alignment system, in the terms of Donohue & Wichmann (2008), might not only fit better with the morphological data that are currently reconstructed for the ancestral language, but also with the existence of non-canonically case-marked subjects in general (Barðdal, Bjarnadóttir, et al. 2013; Danesi, Johnson & Barðdal 2017).
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Nouns and ergatives"
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Gholami, Saloumeh. "Selected features of Bactrian Grammar." Doctoral thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1735-0000-000D-EF94-2.
Full textBooks on the topic "Nouns and ergatives"
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Otsuka, Yuko. Ergative–Absolutive Patterns in Tongan: An Overview. Edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa Demena Travis. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.40.
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Tongan (Polynesian) shows ergative-absolutive (ERG-ABS) patterns in morphology as well as syntax, but the ERG-ABS pattern is not consistent throughout the language. Noun morphology shows a split between clitic pronouns and other types of nouns. In syntax, three phenomena show an ERG-ABS contrast: (a) relativization using the gap strategy is limited to ABS and ERG-relatives require resumption; (b) coordinate reduction applies only if the gap and the antecedent are in the same case, be it ABS or ERG; and (c) only ABS, but not ERG, can serve as the antecedent of the null SE anaphor. No single factor can account for all three of these phenomena and at least two of the three patterns are shown to be better viewed as PF-phenomena. The data suggest that syntactic ergativity should be understood as a construction-specific phenomenon rather than a language-specific property.
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Queixalós, Francesc. What being a Syntactically Ergative Language means for Katukina-Kanamari. Edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa Demena Travis. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.42.
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The structure of the basic clause in Katukina-Kanamari is, to a significant extent, conditioned by the internal structure of the verb phrase, which is starkly parallel to that of noun and adposition phrases. Depending on its internal make up, the verb phrase generates, for the same verbs, two patterns of transitive clauses, ergative and accusative, neither of which is synchronically derived from the other, but the latter appears as highly restricted in distribution. It also yields two patterns of intransitive clauses, one primary, the other resulting from an intransitivizing voice process. Since the basic transitive clause shows a clear syntactic hierarchy between its two arguments, intransitivizing voice is seen as of primary formal motivation: promoting the agent participant to subject status, a far more central need in this language than the functional motivation for relegating the patient participant to either adjunct status or no expression at all.
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Polinsky, Maria. Antipassive. Edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa Demena Travis. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.13.
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This chapter presents typical properties of the antipassive, addresses its cross-linguistic distribution, and discusses main existing analyses. “Antipassives” are constructions in which the logical object of a transitive (two-place) predicate is not realized as a direct object, but instead appears as a non-core argument or left unexpressed (but presupposed). The morphological realization of the antipassive is more varied than is usually assumed; in particular, pseudo noun incorporation, true noun incorporation, and bi-absolutive constructions can instantiate the antipassive. The antipassive and the passive are not mutually exclusive; a number of examples in this chapter provide empirical evidence in support of antipassive/passive compatibility. The antipassive is not limited to ergative languages, although it may be more noticeable under ergative configuration.
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DuBois, John W. Ergativity in Discourse and Grammar. Edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa Demena Travis. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.2.
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This chapter considers how a discourse profile may provide a key piece of the puzzle for explaining the distribution of ergative grammatical structures within and across the world’s languages. The ergative discourse profile, isomorphic to the ergative-absolutive pattern of syntactic alignment, is found in a typologically diverse array of languages including ergative, accusative, and active. Speakers tend to follow soft constraints limiting the Quantity and Role of new and lexical noun phrases within the clause. Evidence for the universality of the ergative discourse profile is examined from typology, child language, and diachrony. A conflicting discourse pressure for topicality motivates accusativity, giving rise to competing motivations. As one recurrent resolution of competing demands, ergativity represents an evolutionarily stable strategy realized in grammar. While discourse-pragmatic and cognitive motivations contribute crucially to a functional explanation of ergativity, additional factors must include semantics of verbs, constructions, aspects, and splits; inherited morphosyntax; and more.
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Massam, Diane. Niuean. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198793557.001.0001.
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This book presents a detailed descriptive and theoretical examination of predicate-argument structure in Niuean, a Polynesian language within the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family, spoken mainly on the Pacific island of Niue and in New Zealand. Niuean has VSO word order and an ergative case-marking system, both of which raise questions for a subject-predicate view of sentence structure. Working within a broadly Minimalist framework, this volume develops an analysis in which syntactic arguments are not merged locally to their thematic sources, but instead are merged high, above an inverted extended predicate which serves syntactically as the Niuean verb, later undergoing movement into the left periphery of the clause. The thematically lowest argument merges as an absolutive inner subject, with higher arguments merging as applicatives. The proposal relates Niuean word order and ergativity to its isolating morphology, by equating the absence of inflection with the absence of IP in Niuean, which impacts many aspects of its grammar. As well as developing a novel analysis of clause and argument structure, word order, ergative case, and theta role assignment, the volume argues for an expanded understanding of subjecthood. Throughout the volume, many other topics are also treated, such as noun incorporation, word formation, the parallel internal structure of predicates and arguments, null arguments, displacement typology, the role of determiners, and the structure of the left periphery.