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Transcript
Bobaljik and Branigan, p. 10 4.1 Ergativity We assume as a point of departure the commonly accepted view of the mapping from argument structure to syntax, and of case/licensing relations in a nominative-accusative system presented in (8). (8) Nominative / Accusative Case pattern T(ense)P 3 Subj 3 T vP 3 Subj 3 Obj 3 v VP 3 V Obj In this structure, the internal argument is base-generated as the complement of the verb. A higher head, v, is responsible for both the assignment of an external theta-role to the subject and for the checking of the objectâs case, in a now familiar manner (e.g., Chomsky, 1995). The subject in turn raises to check case with T. Since (8) is, by hypothesis, the mechanism that underlies a nominative-accusative case array, something must be different in an ergative-absolutive array. It is not our intent to provide a general theory of ergativity (we suspect, with Johns, 1996, that ergativity may be no more a single syntactic phenomenon than is, say, verb-initialness), but we must nevertheless make some assumption about ergative case assignment in Chukchi. We propose that the minimal difference from (8) is that the head v in ergative languages is unable to check accusative case. As a consequence, in a transitive clause, the object will have to raise higher in an ergative language for case reasons. We propose that this raising targets TË, the only other case-related head in the structure, as shown in (9).
