Strawson P F (1952). Introduction to logical theory.London: Methuen.

Stroud B (1984). The significance of philosophical skepti-cism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams M (1991). Unnatural doubts. Cambridge: Black-well.

Wittgenstein L (1969). On certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.

Equatorial Guinea: Language SituationEditorial Team

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Equatorial Guinea is one of the smaller Africancountries, with an area of about 28 000 sq km and apopulation of just under 0.5 million people. Its lan-guage situation, however, is comparatively complex,like that of many neighboring African countries. Geo-graphically, Equatorial Guinea is divided into a main-land part (Riu Muni), bordering Cameroon in thenorth and Gabon in the east and south, and severalislands, the most important of which is Bioko Island(formerly Fernando Po), on which the capital ofMalabo is situated. Equatorial Guinea was a Spanishcolony for almost 200 years, until independence in1968. Although for a long time it was among thepoorer countries of the world, Equatorial Guinea’seconomy has seen tremendous growth rates sincethe first revenues from the newly established oil in-dustry in 1996. It remains to be seen if the increasedincome will benefit the country at large.

The main languages of Equatorial Guinea arethe Bantu languages Fang, a major language ofthe mainland, and Bube, of Bioko Island. SmallerBantu languages spoken mainly on the coastal stripof the mainland and adjacent islands include Batanga,Benga, Ngumba, Ngumbi, Seki, Yasa, and Gyele.Spanish, the official language, is an important lan-guage in government, administration, the media, andeducation. French and West African Pidgin English

(also called Weskos) play an important role as linguafrancas in urban areas, due to comparatively largecommunities from neighboring West Africancountries, especially Nigeria and Cameroon. Twocreole languages are spoken in Equatorial Guinea;Fernando Po Creole English, an English-based creole,similar to Krio, which is found mainly in the northernpart of Bioko Island near Malabo, and Fa D’Ambu(or Annobonese), a Portguese-based creole spoken onthe southern island of Annobon and by the Annobo-nese community on the island of Bioko. Fa D’Ambuoriginated on the then Portuguese island of Annobonas a pidgin language of speakers from different partsof the Portuguese colonies Angola and Sao Tome whohad been brought to Annobon as part of the Portu-guese slave trade. Fa D’Ambu enjoys comparativelyhigh prestige amongs its speakers and is used in manycommunication domains.

Spanish is the dominant language used in adminis-tration, education, and media. There are some eightradio stations and one state-owned TV station thatbroadcast mainly in Spanish, with some programs inother languages. Education at the primary and sec-ondary levels is provided in Spanish. The literacy rateis around 70%.

See also: Pidgins and Creoles: Overview.

Language Maps (Appendix 1): Map 14.

210 Equatorial Guinea: Language Situation

Ergativity

C D Manning, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The term ‘ergativity’ is used to refer to phenomena inwhich the subject of an intransitive verb is treated thesame as the object of a transitive verb, in situationswhere the subject of a transitive verb is treated differ-ently. This contrasts with languages like English, in

which the subject of an intransitive verb is treated thesame as the subject of a transitive verb. The phenom-enon of ergativity was first noted and is most com-mon and clear when it appears in morphologicalmarking, so let us begin with a morphological exam-ple. Contrast Latin morphology, in which the intran-sitive subject of (1a) has the same nominative caseas the transitive subject of (1b), but the intransitiveobject is marked differently, in accusative case, with

Ergativity 211

Inuit (Greenlandic Inuktitut) morphology, in whichthe intransitive subject of (2a) is marked in the sameabsolutive case as the object of the transitive sentencein (2b) and the transitive subject of (2a) is givena different, ergative case marking. One can also ob-serve the Latin morphological pattern in English pro-nouns (She comes/She hears him), but in English,morphological marking is restricted to pronouns.

(1a)

puella veni-t girl.NOM come-PRES.IND.3SG

‘the girl comes’

(1b) puer puella-m audi-t

boy.NOM girl-ACC hear-PRES.IND.3SG

‘the boy hears the girl’

(2a)

Oli sinip-poq Oli.ABS sleep-IND.INTR.3SG

‘Oli sleeps’

(2b) Oli-p neqi neri-vaa

Oli-ERG meat.ABS eat-INDIC.TRANS.3SG.3SG

‘Oli eats meat’

Geographical and Linguistic Distributionof Ergative Languages

Ergative morphology at first seems rather strange andunnatural to those with a background in traditionalgrammar and the major European languages. Howev-er, it is not at all uncommon; around one-quarterto one-third of languages have ergativity (to varyingextents). Ergativity is unevenly distributed geographi-cally. It is particularly common among Australian,South American, Caucasian, Asian, and Pacific lan-guages. In some sense, the best known ergativelanguages are perhaps Basque and Inuit. The ergativelanguage with the most speakers is Hindi. Mayan lan-guages are also mainly ergative. The uneven geographicdistribution of ergative languages is to be expected,given that many languages are related as part of largerlanguage families, which usually occur over a contigu-ous geographic area. However, it is important to notethat many language families contain both ergative andaccusative languages. The Indo-European languagefamily includes many languages exhibiting ergativityin the Indo-Iranian part of the family tree. Conversely,Australian languages are mostly morphologically erga-tive, but there are some subgroups with accusativemorphology, particularly the Mantharta subgroupfrom northwest Western Australia (Dench, 1982).

Ergative Argument Marking(Morphological Ergativity)

It makes good communicative sense that languagesshould have a basic coding method to differentiate the

two arguments of a transitive verb. Although it isunnecessary for some verbs, such as with The mancooked beans, there are many predicates such as Theman saw the lion, in which this disambiguation isimportant. Indeed, all languages do this, using threemechanisms: (1) changing the form of words of thedependent argument, that is, by case-marking mor-phology; (2) putting agreement markers on the headpredicate; or (3) using the ordering of the arguments.This does not mean that the result is always unam-biguous, though; there are some cases in which ambi-guity remains because either case markers showsyncretism across cases or agreement markers donot differentiate arguments of the same person, num-ber, and gender. But in general these mechanismsallow us to distinguish the meanings of examples(1b) above versus (3).

(3)

puer-um puella audi-t boy-ACC girl.NOM hear-PRES.INDIC.3SG

‘the girl hears the boy’

Use of standard grammatical terminology can be-come confusing or even misleading in the context ofergative languages because sometimes people useterms like ‘subject’ thinking of a subject’s role as themain syntactic element in a clause and sometimesthinking from a more semantic vantage point, seeingthe subject as indicating the most agentive argument.Here it is assumed that a predicate has an argumentstructure that gives the semantic roles of the predi-cate’s arguments, and that these are divided into corearguments, which are normally mapped onto thesurface subject and any objects (including possiblyagentive complements in ergative languages), andoblique arguments, which are typically marked byoblique case markers or prepositions. This articlewill use the abbreviations A, S, and O to refer unam-biguously to core arguments of a clause at the levelof argument structure (following the notation ofDixon (1994), the standard reference text on ergativ-ity). S is the single argument of an intransitive verb,and A and O are the two core arguments of a transi-tive verb. The more agent-like argument (or ‘proto-agent,’ in the terminology of Dowty, 1991) is denotedA, and the more ‘undergoer’-like argument (or‘proto-patient’) is denoted O. I will then use theterm ‘subject’ exclusively to refer to the syntacticallymost prominent grammatical argument relation in aclause (Dixon, 1994, refers to this notion as the‘pivot’).

Theories of case marking in turn standardly distin-guish the main grammatical or structural cases, whichmark the core arguments of intransitive and transitiveverbs, regardless of their semantic role, from obliquecases, which are more semantically transparent in

212 Ergativity

meaning. The majority of languages with case mark-ing have at least two structural cases, one used for theA and S arguments and the other for O arguments.These cases are termed ‘nominative’ and ‘accusative.’Normally the accusative case is the marked case, asin the Latin examples 1a and 1b, and so we refer tosuch languages as accusative. By extension, any phe-nomenon that groups together S and A in oppositionto O is also referred to as accusative. In the alternativeorganization, shown for Inuit in examples 2a and 2b,there are still two cases. Most linguists accept thatthey are still both structural cases (although somehave argued for an analysis of ergativity wherebyergative languages have only one structural case andthe ergative case is a semantic case). But in this case,the structural cases group S and O in opposition toA. This time, the case used to mark S and O iscalled ‘absolutive,’ and the case used to markA is called ergative. As in the Inuit example, it is theergative case that is the marked case, and so suchlanguages are termed ergative, and by extension,any phenomenon that groups S and O in oppositionto A is termed ergative.

Concerns of disambiguation motivate a systemthat differentiates A and O, but the remaining ques-tion is how to mark the single argument of an in-transitive verb. One choice would be to mark it in athird way. There are occasional instances of suchtripartite systems, but they are extremely rare andperhaps best thought of as a fairly unstable diachron-ic stage. A second choice would be to mark agent-like arguments of intransitive verbs like A argumentsand patient-like arguments of intransitive verbslike S arguments. Such a ‘split S,’ or ‘active-stative,’system is rather more common and occurs in variouslanguages around the world, particularly NorthAmerican and Caucasian languages – including somelanguages that are usually referred to as ergative(Mithun, 1991). For instance, it can be found inBasque (Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina, 2003):

(4a)

Jon etorri da Jon.ABS come:PTCP.PRF is.3SG.INTR ‘Jon came’

(4b)

Jon-ek saltatu du Jon-ERG jump.PTCP.PRF have.3SG.TR ‘Jon jumped’

(4c) Jon-ek ardo-a ekarri

Jon-ERG wine-DET.ABS bring.PTCP.PRF du have.3SG.TR ‘Jon brought the wine’

Such active-stative marking may either be ‘lexicalized,’whereby certain intransitive verbs select for a particularcase, or it may be ‘fluid,’ with the choice of case

marking indicating the perceived agentivity or volition-ality of the action. It should be noted that for manylanguages with active-stative marking, either fluidmarking or one choice of intransitive subject markeroccurs only with a very restricted set of verbs, and sothe languages have an overwhelmingly accusative orergative character, and this restricted set of verbs mightbe considered exceptional. Such is the case for Basque.

The common situation across languages is that theS argument of intransitives is encoded uniformly likeeither the A or O argument of transitives, regardlessof the verb’s meaning, and this gives us the accusativeand ergative case marking patterns with which webegan in examples 1 and 2. These two case-markingchoices can be illustrated graphically as follows:

In this diagram, there is no particular reason tochoose one system or the other. Using either is some-times natural and sometimes does violence to thesemantics because one is either using a basically agen-tive marker sometimes for undergoer S arguments orelse sometimes using a marker usually used for under-goers for an agent-like S argument. Nevertheless, adesire for economy in surface forms of expressionappears to lead most languages to use one or theother strategy. Moreover, while the above diagrammakes the two methods of marking entirely symmet-ric, the discussion of split ergativity below shows thatthis apparently symmetrical picture is actually some-what misleading.

Ergative case marking is by far the most commonstrategy for ergative core argument marking, and wehave already illustrated it in example 2. In the vastmajority of ergative languages, the absolutive case is abare stem with no overt case marker, and the ergativecase is an overt case marker. In other respects too,the absolutive appears to be unmarked, and the erga-tive is a marked case. A common analysis is thus tounify absolutive and nominative as a single unmarkednominative case and then to view accusative andergative as marked case forms.

A more modest number of languages have an erga-tive verbal cross-referencing system. Sometimes thereis something more like participial agreement infor-mation (number and gender) on the verb agreeingwith the absolutive (as in Hindi), but for otherlanguages, like the Papuan language Yimas (Foley,

Ergativity 213

1991) or Mayan languages, there is an ergative cross-referencing system (S and O are marked the same inan agreement slot that precedes the A agreement slot):

(6a)

pu-tmuk-t 3PL-fall-PERF

‘they fell down’

(6b) pu-ka-tay

3PL-1SG-see

‘I saw them’

(6c)

na-mpu-tay 3SG-3PL-see ‘they saw him’

Finally, there is extremely little evidence of lan-guages showing ergativity only by word order (unlikethe case for accusative languages), but there are casesin which the word order is ergatively patterned in linewith another marking system, for instance Pari(Andersen, 1988):

(7a)

ubur a-tuu Ubur PERF-play ‘Ubur played’

(7b) joobı a-keel uburrı

buffalo.ABS PERF-shoot Ubur-ERG

‘Ubur shot the buffalo’

Syntactic Ergativity

The different morphological marking of ergative lan-guages might suggest a very different syntactic orga-nization at work, and this was certainly assumed bymany early grammarians encountering ergative lan-guages. Anderson (1976) questioned this, suggestingthat languages with ergative morphology actuallyhave the same syntactic organization as languageswith accusative morphology. As an example of this,the Basque examples below from Ortiz de Urbina(1989) show how an absolutive reciprocal can bebound by an ergative noun phrase (NP) (8a), whilethe reverse is impossible (8b). Reciprocals never ap-pear in the A or S subject positions, but an S can alsobind an oblique reciprocal (8c):

(8a)

Gudari-ek elkar hiltzen zuten soldiers-ERG RECIP.ABS kill AUX

‘the soldiersi killed each otheri’

(8b) *Gudari-ak elkarr-ek hiltzen zituen/

zituzten

soldiers-ABS RECIP-ERG kill AUX

‘theyselvesi killed the soldiersi’

(8c) Lagun-ak elkarr-ekin joan dira

friend-ABS

RECIP-with go AUX

‘the friendsi have gone with eachotheri (i.e., together)’

This analysis indeed appears to be true for manylanguages with ergative morphology. However, it

has now been comprehensively established that a sub-set of ergative languages show an ergative organizationin their syntax (to varying extents) as well. The mostfamous examples are certain north-eastern Australianlanguages such as Dyirbal (Dixon, 1972). Among otherevidence, we find that clause linking (processes of re-duction in clause coordination) patterns ergatively. Thetwo clauses have to share an S/O NP:

(9a)

bayi yara baNgul gubi-Ngu this.ABS man.ABS this.ERG gubi-ERG

munda-n baNgun jugumbi-ru balga-n

bring-NFUT this.ERG woman-ERG hit-NFUT

‘the gubi [shaman] brought the man here andthe woman hit (him)’

(9b)

bayi Burrbula baNgul gubi-Ngu this.ABS Burrbula.ABS this.ERG gubi-ERG

bara-n baji-gu

punch-NFUT fall.down-PURP

‘the gubi punched Burrbulai and [hei]fell down’}

Many (although not all) syntactically accusativelanguages have a passive verb form, used to demotean agent to an oblique, a process that can thenfeed syntactic operations like clause chaining (asin I came and was seen by Bill). Conversely, a goodnumber of ergative languages have an antipassiveverb form, used to demote an absolutive to anoblique case, intransitivizing the verb. In the exam-ple below, the antipassive demotes the O argumentof see to being a dative oblique so that clausechaining can occur between two intransitive clauses:

(10)

Nana banaga-Ju bural-Na-Ju we.NOM return-NFUT see-ANTIPASS-PURP

Jura-Ngu

you-DAT

‘we returned and saw you’

However, this is not the full story. Antipassivesoccur quite commonly in ergative languages regard-less of whether they are only morphologically or syn-tactically ergative, and some ergative languages haveboth a passive and an antipassive. An example isInuit, as in the examples below from Bittner (1994).Going in the opposite direction, there do not appearto be cases of a general antipassive construction inlanguages with accusative morphology and syntax,although there are occasional more limited processeswith similar effect (such as unspecified object deletionin English, which gives I ate from the transitive verbeat).

(11a)

Juuna-p miiqqa-t Juuna-ERG children-PL.ABS

paar-ai

look.after-IND.TR.3SG.3PL

‘Juuna is looking after the children’

214 Ergativity

(11b) miiqqa-t Juuna-mit

child-PL.ABS Juuna-ABL

paari-niqar-put

look.after-PASS-IND.INTR.3PL

‘the children are looked after by Juuna’

(11c) Juuna miiqqa-nik

Junna.ABS

child-PL.MOD

paari-si-vuq

look.after-ANTIPASS-IND.INTR.3SG

‘Juuna is looking after children’

In almost all theories of syntax, there are notionscorresponding to subject and object as surfacegrammatical relations, regardless of whether theyare primitives of the theory or defined configuration-ally in terms of phrase structure positions. The ques-tion then is how to map syntactic ergativity ontosurface grammatical relations. There are a numberof conceivable answers to this conundrum, all ofwhich have been proposed by some linguists. Possibleapproaches are given in (12).

(12)

Approach 12a gives the language an analysis likean accusative language. This appears to be the rightanalysis for languages with only morphological erga-tivity, such as Warlpiri or Basque, but does notexplain the appearance of ergative syntactic construc-tions of the sort we have just discussed. The approach

shown in 12b treats the ergative as an oblique ratherthan a core argument of the sentence. This is alsothe claim of an ergative-as-passive analysis, whichsays that syntactic ergativity is the result of covertpassivization. The two analyses differ only in termsof mechanism. Such an analysis says that syntactical-ly ergative languages have only intransitive sentencesand that ergative is an oblique case. This analysis doesnot appear to be correct. There are good argumentsfrom languages that show syntactic ergativity, such asDyirbal and Inuit, that clauses with an ergative NPare transitive (Manning, 1996). For instance, thisseems the only way to understand valency-changingoperations, such as the Dyirbal applicative, or thepresence of nominative-accusative morphology onpronouns in the language. Approach 12c treats theabsolutive S as an object, and so sentences with anS are in some sense intransitive but subjectless. Thisanalysis has some appeal but fails to capture that theabsolutive NPs in syntactically ergative languageshave classic subject properties for phenomena likeclause chaining, as we observed above. The four-rela-tions analysis makes all four putative grammaticalrelations available in every language. It is harder toprove such an analysis wrong, but besides transgres-sing on the count of general permissiveness, it doesnot by itself predict the restrictive patterns of mixedsyntactic behavior that are found in languages, whichwe turn to below. The inverse analysis treats the S andO as the grammatical subject in syntactically ergativelanguages, while the A is analyzed as an object (or anagentive complement, if one frowns on viewing asemantic agent as an object). This analysis naturallyexplains the surface syntactic patterning of ergativelanguages, such as the Dyirbal clause-chaining factsshown in example 10, and is the analysis adopted inManning (1996). However, more needs to be said toexplain the rather mixed character of many syntacti-cally ergative languages, and this topic is taken up inthe next section.

An alternative analysis is to suggest that, whilethere is an inversion whereby the absolutive argu-ment has a certain sort of prominence in syntacticallyergative languages, this does not happen at thelevel of grammatical relations (that is, an analysisof syntactic accusativity is assumed) but rather atthe level of interclausal organization or discourse(Du Bois, 1987).

Split Ergativity

There is an asymmetry in linguistic systems in thatwhile many languages appear to be entirely accusa-tive in terms of their case marking, agreement, and

Ergativity 215

syntactic systems, there do not appear to be anylanguages that pattern entirely ergatively. Many lan-guages have a largely ergative nature, but therealways seem to be some traces of accusative organi-zation, while yet other languages show quite a mix ofergative and accusative characteristics. The split be-tween ergative and accusative patterning can beorganized along a number of dimensions, and it canspan both morphology and syntax.

Splits in Case Marking

Beginning first with morphology, in general lan-guages with ergative case marking patterns are actu-ally split between ergative and accusative. There is acontinuum; some use nearly entirely ergative casemarking, whereas in others ergativity is much morelimited. A dimension of variation is what conditionsthe split. Various Indic languages, such as Hindi, arewell known for having split ergative case marking inwhich ergativity appears only in the perfect aspect.A tense- or aspect-conditioned split is also found insome other languages, such as Burushaski. SomeUrdu examples from Butt (1995) are shown here:

h

(13a) Naadyaa xat lik -tii Nadya(FEM) letter(MASC) write-IMPF.F.SG

hai

be.PRES.3SG

‘Nadya writes a letter’

(13b) Naadyaa-ne xat likh-aa

Nadya(FEM)-ERG

letter(MASC) write-PERF.MASC.SG

hai.

be.PRES.3SG

‘Nadya has written a letter’

(13c) Naadyaa-ne cit. t.

hii likh-ii

Nadya(FEM)-ERG NOTE (FEM) write-PERF.FEM.SG

hai

be.PRES.3SG

‘Nadya has written a note’

Note the change of verbal agreement as well as thecase marking (in general, Hindi verbs agree only withnominative arguments).

Perhaps the most common, and certainly the mostdiscussed, kind of split-ergative case marking occurswhen some noun classes are marked ergatively andothers accusatively. The splits that usually occur havean interesting patterning, which is captured in theSilverstein Hierarchy (Silverstein, 1976):

(14)

The Silverstein Nominal Hierarchy 1st and 2nd person pronouns > 3rd person

pronouns/demonstratives > Proper nouns >Animate nouns > Inanimate nouns

The general functional pressure underlying this hier-archy is that things at the left end of the hierarchy aremore likely to be an actor that serves as the A role,while things at the right end are more likely to be

acted on and fill the O role. To the extent that casemarking serves to mark nonstandard configurationsbut an unmarked absolutive/nominative marks thedefault role of an NP, it makes sense to mark thingsat the right end, when they are serving as A, by anergative case and things at the left end, when they areserving as O, by an accusative case. Many languagesdo this. For example, in Dyirbal, just first- and sec-ond-person pronouns have nominative/accusativemarking; all other nominals are ergatively marked(Dixon, 1994):

(15a)

Nana banaga-Ju we.NOM return-NONFUT

‘we returned’

(15b) Jurra banaga-Ju

you.PL.NOM

return-NONFUT

‘you all returned’

(15c) Jurra Nana-na bura-n

you.PL.NOM

we-ACC see-NONFUT

‘you all saw us’

(15d) Numa yabu-Ngu bura-n

father.ABS

mother-ERG see-NONFUT

‘Mother saw Father’

Note that this morphological split does not haveramifications for the syntax of Dyirbal; phenomenalike clause chaining behave the same regardless ofthe morphology, as was partially illustrated in (10)above. This independence of morphology and syntaxappears to be the norm across ergative languages,regardless of whether they have ergative or accusativesyntax.

Things do not always work out quite as simply asthe Silverstein Hierarchy suggests. Sometimes theranges of ergative and accusative marking overlap,and there is tripartite marking in the middle of thescale; sometimes the facts are complicated by certaincase markings being present in particular noun classesat a more fine-grained level than the hierarchy abovecan capture. But the hierarchy is nevertheless a usefultypological starting point.

Split between Case Marking and Agreement

Another very common form of split is between nomi-nal case marking and verbal coreferencing. Here, thestandard pattern is that nouns show ergative casemarking, but the verbal coreferencing is accusative.This is illustrated by the Australian language Warlpiriin the examples below. Nouns (including pronouns)show ergative case marking, but verbal agreement onthe auxiliary cross-references core arguments on anaccusative pattern.

(16a)

Ngaju ka-rna wangka-mi I.ABS AUX.PRES-1SG speak-NONPAST

‘I am speaking’

216 Ergativity

(16b) Ngajulu-rlu ka-rna-ngku nyuntu

I-ERG AUX.PRES-1SG-2 you.ABS

nya-nyi

see-NONPAST

‘I see you’

There do not appear to be languages that exhibit theopposite split of having uniform accusative morphol-ogy but ergative verbal agreement.

Splits in Syntactic Behavior

The traditional basis for identifying syntactic ergativ-ity is to use phenomena that linguists have seen asassociated with the subject of a sentence, then to seewhether a phenomenon exists in a certain language,and then whether it applies to only S and A nounphrases or only S and O noun phrases. On this basis,Dyirbal has been the canonical case of a languagewith strongly ergative syntax. However, even in Dyir-bal, it is not the case that all subject properties fall tothe absolutive NP. For instance, the role of being theaddressee of an imperative certainly groups S andA. Dyirbal perhaps only looks more ergative thansome other languages because some other propertiesthat typically behave syntactically accusatively in lan-guages are not applicable tests in Dyirbal. For exam-ple, reflexive binding is done by a detransitivizingverb form. Although there are some analytically diffi-cult cases, most languages with syntactic ergativityseem to show a fairly consistent split in terms ofwhich syntactic tests show syntactic ergativity andwhich do not, as in Table 1.

For example, we can contrast in Inuit the fact thatonly S and O arguments can be relativized on in Inuit(participial) relatives, as in 17a through 17c, whileonly S and A arguments can control reflexives, as in18a through 18c:

(17a)

nanuq Piita-p tuqu-ta-a polar.bear Piita-ERG kill-TR.PART-3SG

‘a polar bear killed by Piita’

(17b) miiraq kamat-tu-q

child.ABS

angry-REL.INTR-SG

‘the child that is angry’

(17c) *angut aallaat tigu-sima-sa-a

Table 1 Syntactic phenomena typically showing ergative

versus accusative behavior

man.ABS gun.ABS take-PRF-REL.TR-3SG.3SG

*‘the man who took the gun’

Ergative S¼O grouping Accusative S¼A grouping

(18a) ataata-ni Juuna-p tatig-aa

Shared argument in Addressee of imperative

father-4SG.ABS Juuna-ERG trust-IND.TR.3SG.3SG

coordination

‘Juunai trusts hisi father’

Obligatory element in Binder of reflexive pronouns

(18b) Aani illu-mi-nut ingerla-voq clause Anne.ABS house-4SG-TERM go-IND.INTR.3SG

Raised argument Controlled argument in controlled

‘Annei is going to heri house’ clauses (18c) *Anaana-mi Piita nagligi-jaNa

Pivot for relativization Used in switch-reference systems

mother-4SG.ERG Piita.ABS love-3SG.3SG Wide scope or definiteness needed *‘Hisi mother loves Piitai’

Manning (1996) proposes that the way to explain thissplit is to argue that the S and O NPs fill the gram-matical relation subject in syntactically ergative lan-guages, but that the A and O arguments remain themost prominent argument at the level of argumentstructure, and then to adopt an analysis in whichphenomena like control and reflexive binding aresensitive to argument structure rather than to surfacesyntax (Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005). An advan-tage of such an analysis is that it suggests a promisingextension to the treatment of Philippine languages(and Austronesian languages more generally). Philip-pine languages have commonly been seen as a ratherspecial third class of languages, fitting neither thesyntactically ergative nor the accusative mold, andwith a famous split in subject properties (Schachter,1976). But, given that syntactically ergative languagesexhibit much the same split of subject properties,the two classes can be folded together. Philippinelanguages are then special only in allowing a greaterrange of semantic roles to serve as syntactic subjectthan most languages, whereas other Austronesianlanguages, such as Balinese (Bali), have a more con-ventional syntactically ergative appearance (Wechslerand Arka, 1998).

Historical Change

Ergativity splits almost necessarily seem somewhatmessy from the viewpoint of theoretical syntax, where-as a neater analysis would result from uniform behav-ior. But split behavior is well motivated functionally:both the A¼S and O¼S identification have a strongsemantic basis, and it makes particular sense to makethe former identification with prototypical agents (pro-nouns or all animate nouns) and the latter identifica-tion with prototypical undergoers (inanimate nouns).Split ergativity can also be viewed historically as anintermediate point in a historical evolution. Languagesare not statically ergative or accusative. There are fairlywell examined cases of languages changing their char-acter from ergative to accusative and vice versa. There

Ergativity 217

is also a fairly intuitive account of how this can happen,dating to at least Kuryłowicz (1946). The basic obser-vation is that if an accusative language has a passive(that allows expression of an oblique agent) and, forwhatever reasons, prefers passive verb forms to thepoint that it stops using transitive verb forms (asseems to happen in various languages, such as thePolynesian language Maori), then the language hasalmost become ergative. This transition is completewhen the previous marker of an oblique agent is rein-terpreted as the marker of a core grammatical relation,and the old passive marker is reanalyzed (perhaps as atransitive marker). The same account can be told inreverse for an ergative language that prefers the anti-passive, becoming accusative. From what we knowfrom incomplete historical records, both of these path-ways of change do seem to occur. But this is not the onlymeans by which ergativity can arise or be lost. Anotherparticularly common pathway for languages to becomeergative is through reanalysis of nominalizations, fre-quently those involving passive participles. This path-way seems to be the historical basis in a numberof language families (for example, Inuit, Mayan, andAustronesian languages) for using the same case formfor both the genitive and the ergative case.

Final Remarks

Dixon (1994) is the first place that readers shouldlook for a more comprehensive study of ergativity.Plank (1979) is an important earlier collection. Therehas been much theoretical literature on the treatmentof ergative languages. For case marking, importantrecent approaches include Bittner and Hale (1996)and Woolford (1997), while for syntax, Bittner(1994) and Manning (1996) present detailed studies.

The term ‘ergative’ has also been used by someauthors to refer to lexical semantic alternations inwhich a verb appears both transitively and intransi-tively, with the object of the transitive use having thesame undergoer semantic role (theme/patient) as thesubject of the intransitive use (such as for the verbbroke: The boy broke the mirror/the mirror broke).Either the subject of the transitive may be referred toas ergative, or the intransitive form may be referred toas an ergative verb. These extensions of the term aregenerally seen as confusing by typological linguists;the intransitive form of such verbs is probably betterreferred to as ‘unaccusative.’

See also: Active/Inactive Marking; Argument Structure;

Case; Morphological Typology; Thematic Structure.

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