Wallace Chafe | University of California, Santa Barbara
The letters S, A, and O have been used heuristically for distinguishing ergative-absolutive languages from nominative-accusative languages. This schema, however, has serious disadvantages for the understanding of individual grammars and even more for broad typological work, because it obscures the incommensurable ways in which participants may be related to events or states. Three of these ways are described here and their incommensurability demonstrated. One is the starting point function, reflected in grammatical subjects; another consists of the semantic roles that are reflected in grammaticized agent-patient marking; the third is immediacy of involvement, reflected in absolutive marking. These relations may be cognitively available to speakers of all languages, and are often grammaticized in different parts of the grammar of a single language. Now that more is known about ways in which languages vary, it is time to sharpen our tools so that we may move on to understanding the forces that shape the grammatical structures we find.
2019. Semantic Alignment in Chitimacha. International Journal of American Linguistics 85:3 ► pp. 313 ff.
Kumagai, Yoshiharu
2006. Information management in intransitive subjects: Some implications for the Preferred Argument Structure theory. Journal of Pragmatics 38:5 ► pp. 670 ff.
MAGNE, CYRILLE, MIREILLE BESSON & STÉPHANE ROBERT
2014. Context influences the processing of verb transitivity in French sentences: more evidence for semantic−syntax interactions. Language and Cognition 6:2 ► pp. 181 ff.
McGregor, William B.
2009. Typology of Ergativity. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:1 ► pp. 480 ff.
McGregor, William B.
2010. Optional ergative case marking systems in a typological-semiotic perspective. Lingua 120:7 ► pp. 1610 ff.
2015. Agent prominence in symmetrical voice languages. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 68:4 ► pp. 551 ff.
Shenk, Petra Scott
2006. The interactional and syntactic importance of prosody in Spanish-English bilingual discourse. International Journal of Bilingualism 10:2 ► pp. 179 ff.
SHIBASAKI, REIJIROU
2006. THE EVOLUTION OF PREFERRED ARGUMENT STRUCTURE IN ENGLISH. ENGLISH LINGUISTICS 23:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
2005. Integrating Syntax and Pragmatics: Word Order and Transitivity Variations in Tunumiisut. International Journal of American Linguistics 71:4 ► pp. 445 ff.
Zúñiga, Fernando
2018. The diachrony of morphosyntactic alignment. Language and Linguistics Compass 12:9
[no author supplied]
2021. References and Abbreviations. International Journal of American Linguistics 87:S1 ► pp. S189 ff.
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