Ergative–absolutive alignment

An ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative) is one that treats the subject of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs.

Ergative vs. accusative languages

Ergative languages are in contrast to nominative-accusative languages (such as English), which treat the object of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs.

These different arguments are often symbolized as follows:

P = object of transitive verb (also symbolized as O)
S = subject of intransitive verb
A = subject of transitive verb

The relationship between ergative and accusative systems can be schematically represented as the following:

	Ergative-absolutive	Nominative-accusative
P	same	different
S	same	same
A	different	same

Realization of ergativity

Morphological ergativity

If the language has morphological case, then the verb arguments are marked thus:

The subject of a transitive verb is marked with a case conventionally known as "ergative".
The subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are both marked with a case called "absolutive".

Syntactic ergativity

If there's no case marking, the language can resort to word order (for example, the absolutive argument comes before the verb and the ergative argument comes after it). For instance, Abkhaz has no morphological ergative case, but its verbal agreement structure is ergative.

In languages with ergative-absolutive systems, the absolutive form is usually the most unmarked form of a word, and the form that is used as the lemma.

The term ergative-absolutive is considered by some unsatisfactory, since there are very few languages without any patterns that exhibit nominative-accusative alignment. Instead, they posit, that one should only speak of ergative-absolutive systems, which languages employ to different degrees.

See morphosyntactic alignment for a more technical explanation and a comparison with nominative-accusative languages.

Split ergativity

Many languages classified as ergative in fact show split ergativity, whereby syntactic and/or morphological ergative pattern are conditioned by some part of the grammatical context (typically the persons of the verb arguments, or the tense/aspect of the verb). As an example of split ergativity, is found in the Urdu and Hindi languages, that have an ergative case on subjects in tenses showing perfective aspect for transitive and ditransitive verbs, while for other cases subjects apear in nominative case.

laRk-aa ketaab xareed-taa hey

→ boy-sg.masc=nom book.nom buy-ImPerf.sg.masc be=pres

→ The boy buys a book

laRkey=ney ketaab xareed-ee

→ boy-sg.mas=erg book.nom buy-perf.sg.fem

→ The boy bought a book

Dyirbal pronouns are morphologically nominative-accusative when the subject is first or second person, but ergative when the subject is a third person.

Examples

The only ergative-absolutive language in Europe is the language isolate Basque. Note the following examples:

Gizona etorri da. "The man has arrived."

Gizonak mutila ikusi du. "The man saw the boy."

In Basque, gizon is "man", mutil is "boy", and a suffixed -a shows the definite form ("the"). You will notice that gizon is different depending on whether it is the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb. The first form is in the absolutive case (marked by a null morpheme) and the second form is in the ergative case (marked by a suffixed -k).

Georgian also has an ergative alignment, but the subject is only marked with the ergative case for transitive verbs in the past tense (also known as the "aorist screeve"). It is also important to note that the ergative case only exists for the third persons. Compare:

Katsi vashls chams. "The man is eating an apple."

Katsma vashli chama. "The man ate an apple."

Kats- is the root of the word "man". In the first sentence (present continuous tense) the subject is in the nominative case (katsi). In the second sentence, which shows ergative alignment, the root is marked with the ergative suffix -ma.

However, there are some intransitive verbs in Georgian that behave like transitive verbs, and therefore employ the ergative case in the past tense. Consider:

Katsma daatsemina. "The man sneezed."

Although the verb sneeze is clearly intransitive, it is conjugated like any other transitive verbs. In Georgian there are a few verbs like these, and there has not been a clear-cut explanation as to why these verbs have evolved this way. One explanation is that verbs such as "sneeze" did use to have a direct object (the object being "nose" in the case of "sneeze") and over time lost these objects, yet kept their transitive behavior.

Distribution of ergative languages

Prototypical ergative languages are, for the most part, restricted to specific regions of world: the Caucasus, parts of North America and Mesoamerica, and Australia. The specific languages are the following:

Dyirbal and several other Australian Aboriginal languages, which are famous in the linguistic literature for their ergative patterns
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Berber languages (Afro-Asiatic)
Sāmoan and many other Austronesian languages
Virtually all Caucasian languages
Many languages of the Americas, such as Mayan and Eskimo-Aleut languages.
Tibetan

Many other languages have more limited ergativity, such as Pashto and Hindi, (Indo-Iranian), where ergative behavior occurs only in the perfective.

Traces of ergativity in English

English does show a trace of something that could be regarded as ergativity. With an intransitive verb, adding the suffix -ee to the verb produces a label for the person performing the action:

"John has retired." → "John is a retiree."

"John has escaped." → "John is an escapee."

"John is standing." → "John is a standee."

However, with a transitive verb, adding -ee does not produce a label for the person doing the action. Instead, it gives us a label for the person to whom the action is done:

"Mike employs Susie." → "Susie is an employee."

"Mike has inducted Susie." → "Susie is an inductee."

"Mike has appointed Susie" → "Susie is an appointee."

The differing effect of the "-ee" suffix, depending on the transitivity of the verb, can be considered ergativity. (Etymologically, the sense in which "-ee" denotes the object of a transitive verb is the original one, arising from French past participles in "-é". This would still be considered the prevalent sense in UK English: the intransitive uses are all 19th century American coinages and all except "escapee" are still marked as "chiefly U.S." by the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Philippine languages as ergative

Tagalog

Bibliography

Dixon, R. M. W. (1979). Ergativity. Language, 55 (1), 59-138. (Revised in book format Dixon 1994).
Dixon, R. M. W. (1994). Ergativity. Cambridge University Press.
Foley, William; & Van Valin, Robert. (1984). Functional syntax and universal grammar. Cambridge University Press.
Kroeger, Paul. (1993). Phrase structure and grammatical relations in Tagalog. Stanford: CSLI.
Schachter, Paul. (1976). The subject in Philippine languages: Actor, topic, actor-topic, or none of the above. In C. Li. (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 491-518). New York: Academic Press.
Schachter, Paul. (1977). Reference-related and role-related properties of subjects. In P. Cole & J. Sadock (Eds.), Syntax and semantics: Grammatical relations (Vol. 8, pp. 279-306). New York: Academic Press.