Re: THEORY: Ergative syntax

--- Jesse Bangs wrote:
This one's for all of the hardcore linguists out there.  Recently while
working on Hiksilipsi, I came across a problem that, surprisingly,
requires a fair bit of syntactic theory for me to cause.  My question is:
 in an ergative language, which case does the verb assign to its internal
object and which to the external?
--- end of quote ---

Ask a hardcore question, get a hardcore answer: I don't think there's any
concensus within syntactic theory about how absolutive and ergative cases are
assigned. Some would say that absolutive case is assigned to the internal
argument position in a transitive construction and the external argument
position in an intransitive construction, others would say that it's assigned
to the external argument in both cases, and still others would say that it
depends on the language (some languages being 'structurally ergative' and
others just being 'morphologically ergative').

If you *really* want to know what 'hardcore theorists' are saying about ergative
syntax and case-assignment, have a look at a pair of articles written by Maria
Bittner and Ken Hale, published in the journal _Linguistic Inquiry_ (volume 27;
1997). Should be available in most university libraries. These articles are
quite technical, but since you clearly know something about tree-drawing, you
should be able to follow the basic ideas.

Matt.

Matthew Pearson
Department of Linguistics
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd
Portland, OR 97202
503 771 1112 x 7618