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Fluid Ergativity in Gujarati and Kashmiri and the Notion of Suspension

Peter Edwin Hook, University of Michigan and Omkar N. Koul, Central Institute of Indian Languages

An ergative-absolutive pattern in subject and object case-marking and in verb agreement is found in the tensed clauses of most Indo-Aryan languages spoken west of Bihar. In all such languages the choice of subject case is an automatic consequence of logically prior choices in predicate type (transitive vs. intransitive), tense (past or perfect vs. others), and aspect (non-durative vs. durative): That is, the subjects of all transitive predicates in a non-durative aspect of the past or perfect get the ergative case and the verb agrees with the object (or assumes a default third person masculine singular form):

In some of these languages, however, in a restricted set of constructions, the automatic operation of ordinary subject-marking rules is suspended and the use of ergative case or postposition is determined by the interaction of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. The Gujarati inceptive provides an example of such a suspension. The transitive predicate ma:ND 'build' has been grammaticalized as an auxiliary meaning 'begin to'. When the predicate complement of ma:ND is itself intransitive normal rules are suspended and a series of nested conditions comes into play to determine the subject's case-marking:

(3) a. If the complement's predicate is a passive, use nominative for the subject, or

b. if the subject refers to a source of experience or a sensation, use the nominative, or

c. if the predicate is one that selects only "unaccusative" subjects, use the nominative.

d. Otherwise, if the subject is sentient and acts volitionally, use the ergative, but

e. if the subject is sentient and acts non-volitionally, use the nominative.

f. If the subject is non-sentient and acts independently or unexpectedly, use the ergative.

g. Otherwise, use the nominative.

In the paper we show that an etymologically unrelated construction in Kashmiri also leads to the suspension of its automatic rules of subject marking and that the set of conditions and constraints governing the appearance of ergative or nominative case that comes into play is largely parallel to the Gujarati set.


next up previous
Next: The LSA in New Up: The 33rd meeting of Previous: The 33rd meeting of

Rajesh Bhatt
Mon Mar 30 11:24:59 EST 1998