LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:12 December 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Ergativity in Axomiya

Atanu Saha and Bipasha Patgiri

Abstract

The paper surveys the principal generative syntactic assumptions that have been proposed for ergative construction and discusses the pattern of the ergative case marking in Assamese. For a language L which shows some mixed properties of ergativity and accusativity in a certain respect R, the language L is said to be split-ergative with respect to R (Comrie 1978, Dixon 1979, and DeLancey 1981). Unlike Dyirbal (which has been exemplified by Dixon’s seminal work and has been considered a typical example of ergative language), where the pronouns are morphologically nominative-accusative when the agent is first or second person and ergative when the agent is a third person. And also unlike another Indo Aryan ergative language Hindi which shows TAM split (and no person based split), Assamese exhibits the opposite pattern with person based split and no TAM split for ergativity/agentivity.

Introduction

The Indo-Aryan system of marking of case has recently caught attention from linguists with the advent of distributive morphology (for case marking on arguments) and relator nouns (for adpositions). The traditional ways of marking subjects of unaccusative, unergative and transitive had been same whereas, recent discussions have promoted the view that these might have some variation cross-linguistically. Eventually, that the categorization of verbs and the case marking on arguments are completely language-specific and somewhat context dependent, has also been of importance lately among linguistic discussions. In this paper we consider the case of Assamese subjects and try to seek for an explanation for their alignment with an ergative system in some cases and nominative case elsewhere.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Atanu Saha, M.A., Ph.D. Scholar
School of Languages and Linguistics
UG Science Building
Jadavpur University
188 Raja SC Mullick Road
Kolkata 700 032
West Bengal
India
atanu.jnu@gmail.com
atanu.saha@school.jdvu.ac.in

Bipasha Patgiri, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Scholar
Room No: 242
Department of English and Foreign languages
Academic Building I
Tezpur Univeristy
Napaam, Tezpur 784028
Assam
India
bipasha@tezu.ernet.in
bipasha.patgiri2009@gmail.com

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