MINIMALIST ANALYSIS OF ERGATIVITY

Abstract

This paper proposes a Minimalist analysis of the case and [EPP] features on T and v which accounts for the basic morphosyntactic properties of syntactic ergativity. I show first that absolutives should not be analyzed as subjects and accordingly propose that their case-licensing features be distributed between T and v. The hallmark characteristics of syntactic ergativity, which are the absolutive restriction on A'- extraction and the antipassive construction, are accounted for by limiting [EPP] features to transitive (and not intransitive or antipassive) v. Generally speaking, I show that while both case and [EPP] features are obligatorily checked by T in accusative languages, the role of in feature-checking is much more prominent in ergative languages. In descriptive terms, it can be said that accusative languages have a clear notion of grammatical subject, while in ergative languages absolutives have properties of both subjects and objects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.