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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Grammar, syntax, linguistic structure
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Deconstructing Ergativity - Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features (Hardcover)
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Deconstructing Ergativity - Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Nominative-accusative and ergative are two common alignment types
found across languages. In the former type, the subject of an
intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are
expressed the same way, and differently from the object of a
transitive. In ergative languages, the subject of an intransitive
and the object of a transitive appear in the same form, the
absolutive, and the transitive subject has a special, ergative,
form. Ergative languages often follow very different patterns, thus
evading a uniform description and analysis. A simple explanation
for that has to do with the idea that ergative languages, much as
their nominative-accusative counterparts, do not form a uniform
class. In this book, Maria Polinsky argues that ergative languages
instantiate two main types, the one where the ergative subject is a
prepositional phrase (PP-ergatives) and the one with a noun-phrase
ergative. Each type is internally consistent and is characterized
by a set of well-defined properties. The book begins with an
analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a
manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses
diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to
show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs.
Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for
syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses
and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity
approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative
languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two
types. The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm
PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data
used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork
hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.
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