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 don’t 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.

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

A simple point

• Here’s 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

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.

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’

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)

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/TransNOM ERG

Subj/Intrans NOM ABS

Obj/Trans ACC ABS

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