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Article published In:
Diachronic Dimensions of Alignment Typology
Edited by Eystein Dahl
[Diachronica 38:3] 2021
► pp. 314–357

Two types of alignment change in nominalizations

Austronesian and Japanese

| Academia Sinica
| University of Tsukuba

This paper investigates two instances of alignment change, both of which resulted from reanalysis of a nominalized embedded clause type, in which the external argument was marked with genitive case and the internal argument was focused. We show that a subject marked with genitive case in the early development of Austronesian languages became ergative-marked when object relative clauses in cleft constructions were reanalyzed as transitive root clauses. In contrast to this, the genitive case in Old Japanese nominalized clauses, marking an external argument, was extended to mark all subjects. This occurred after adnominal clauses were reanalyzed as root clauses. Japanese underwent one more step in order for genitive to be reanalyzed as nominative: the reanalysis of impersonal psych transitive constructions as intransitives.

With these two case studies of Austronesian and Japanese, we show that reanalysis of nominalization goes in either direction, ergative or accusative, depending on the syntactic conditions involved in the reanalysis.

Keywords: active-inactive, cleft, nominative case, psych predicate, split-ergativity, syntactic reconstruction, unaccusative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Genitive to ergative in Austronesian
    • 2.1Previous connections between Austronesian clause structure and nominalization
    • 2.2Reanalysis
    • 2.3Summary
  • 3.Genitive to nominative in Japanese
    • 3.1Two types of genitive markers in Old Japanese
    • 3.2After OJ: A change from active to accusative alignment
    • 3.3Reanalysis
      • 3.3.1Psych predicate constructions
      • 3.3.2Impersonal psych transitive constructions in Old Japanese
      • 3.3.3After OJ: Psych predicate constructions
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Digitalized texts
  • References
Published online: 23 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.19044.ald
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