Citation

McGregor WB. Lang. Linguist. Compass 2009; 3(1): 480-508.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Blackwell Publishing, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00118.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world's languages, with a particular focus on one type of morphological ergativity, namely in case-marking. While languages are rarely entirely consistent in ergative case-marking, and the inconsistencies vary considerably across languages, they are nevertheless not random. Thus splits in case-marking, in which ergative patterning is restricted to certain domains, follow (with few exceptions) universal tendencies. So also are there striking cross-linguistic commonalities among systems in which ergative case-marking is optional, although systematic investigation of this domain is quite recent. Recent work on the diachrony of ergative systems and case-markers is overviewed, and issues for further research are identified.