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 1Type 2 Subj/TransNOMERG Subj/IntransNOMABS Obj/TransACCABS So type 1 = “nominative- accusative language, type 2 = ergative- absolutive language