Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism
Name
816-14483-1-PB.pdf
Size
3.33 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4058553746455bccfaa85091372ceb63
Author(s)
Zompì, Stanislao
Date Issued
July 2019
Journal
Glossa
Publisher
Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
Citation
Zompì, Stanislao. "Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism." Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4,1 (July 2019): 73 © Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
I show that case syncretism obeys the same *ABA restriction previously observed in case-sensitive suppletion: no Vocabulary-Insertion rule can apply to both an inherent case and an unmarked core case (nominative/absolutive) without also applying to another core case (accusative/ergative). The case hierarchy that these effects motivate is one where the ergative is consistently put in the same box as the accusative, separately from all inherent cases. This offers a new kind of argument in favor of dependent-case theories, whereby accusative and ergative are both structurally assigned to nominals that stand in an asymmetric c-command relation to another as-yet-caseless nominal nearby. Keywords: *ABA; syncretism; suppletion; ergativity; dependent case; Impoverishment
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.816
