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Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 20 of 24 for “"ergative"”.
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Default ergative
In this thesis, I propose the hypothesis that ergative Case in certain languages may be assigned to a DP which would be otherwise Case-less within a certain domain. In this sense, ergative Case appears to be a default. At the same time, I argue that ergative Case may be assigned by any phase head …
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Crossing and nested paths--NP movement in accusative and ergative languages
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1992.
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Dimensions of ergativity in Inuit : theory and microvariation
This thesis investigates microvariation in the ergative system of the Inuit dialect continuum, as a window into the theoretical status of ergative alignment, argument licensing, and Agree. The empirical focus of this thesis is on the Inuit varieties in which the canonical erg-abs ergative …
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Distributed Agency: An Analysis of Get-Passive in English
<p>The focus of this thesis is the ergative behavior of the verb get in the passive construction in English, e.g., 'Mary got paid'. I argue that get in the passive shows the properties of ergative verbs, such as break and open, and that it is therefore best analyzed as an ergative verb in this …
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Distributed Agency: An Analysis of Get-Passive in English
<p>The focus of this thesis is the ergative behavior of the verb get in the passive construction in English, e.g., 'Mary got paid'. I argue that get in the passive shows the properties of ergative verbs, such as break and open, and that it is therefore best analyzed as an ergative verb in this …
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The acquisition of split-ergativity in Kurmanji Kurdish
… the acquisition of the case-marking systems of ergative languages suggests that children acquire ergative and accusative languages equally easily (Van Valin 1992), depending on the degree to which the case morphology is consistently ergative or accusative and the degree to which adults use the …
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Subjects And Subjecthood In Nepali: An Analysis Of Nepali Clause Structure And Its Challenges To Relational Grammar And Government & Binding
… clauses, passive clauses, and, in Early Nepali, ergative clauses. The properties of basic clause subjects are split in these clauses between two NPs--the 'logical', nonnominative subject and the grammatical nominative subject. This distribution can be explained by assuming that an NP which …
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Case and Phi-agreement in Laki: Parametrizing split-ergativity in Kurdish
This thesis examines split ergative alignments in five dialects of Kurdish (Northwestern Iranian), with the primary focus on the argument structure and case and agreement patterns in Laki (Southern Kurdish). I show that these Kurdish dialects uniformly follow an aspect-based split where the …
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Recovering Ergativity in Heritage Samoan
… production and grammaticality judgement of key ergative features in declaratives, wh-questions, and relative clauses in three distinct speaker groups: native, heritage, and L2. The findings from this dissertation suggest that ergativity in Samoan is indeed a fragile system particularly …
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Nominalizations and aspect
… tense (often called perfective or aorist), with ergative-absolutive case pattern, to an imperfective where case marking follows the nominative-accusative pattern. The split exists in main clauses in several northern Je languages, among which Mebengokre, though in a slightly different form. …
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Aspects of a Karitiana grammar
… nondeclarative focused clauses, the verb shows ergative agreement. I argue that the functional morphology inserted as a focus marker deactivates the agreement features of I, the functional head that would normally covertly agree with the ergative subject, and as a result, the other functional …
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Complementation in Chol (Mayan) : a theory of split ergativity :
… contexts in which we find the appearance of a nonergative pattern in an otherwise ergative language-namely, the nonperfective aspects-involve an intransitive aspectual matrix verb and a subordinated lexical verb. In other words, the nonperfective forms show a dissociation between the syntactic …
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Warlpiri : theoretical implications
… an analysis of split ergativity in Warlpiri (ergative-/absolutive case-marking, nominative/accusative agreement), deriving the split from a dissociation of case and agreement, and the inherent nature of ergative case, rather than from non-configurationality. Extending the analysis to …
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Aspects of Chinese syntax: Ergativity and phrase structure
… if it is recognized that Chinese has both unergative (accusative) and ergative-type structures.
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Tseltal clause structure
… Case Constraint (PCC). It is argued that an ergative language like Tseltal exhibits object-to-subject raising, the counterpart to subject-to-subject raising in languages like English. The distribution of non-third person objects in non-finite clauses is explained as a consequence of …
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Verb agreement and case marking in Burushaski
… nominal. Also the constraints on the usage of ergative, absolutive and oblique case, and other indicators of grammatical relations on nominals, have been insufficiently characterized in the literature on Burushaski. In this paper I propose an account of these facts, and several others relating …
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The Yawuru language of West Kimberley : a meaning-based description
… In terms of syntactic typology, Yawuru is an ergative language which, however, reveals an accusative-type verb. agreement system. The practical orthography for the Yawuru language employed in this monograph is allophonic (i.e. slightly over-differentiating) rather than purely phonemic. Reasons …
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The Yawuru language of West Kimberley : a meaning-based description
… In terms of syntactic typology, Yawuru is an ergative language which, however, reveals an accusative-type verb. agreement system. The practical orthography for the Yawuru language employed in this monograph is allophonic (i.e. slightly over-differentiating) rather than purely phonemic. Reasons …
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Topics in the Grammar of Koryak
… is consistent with a configurational account of ergative and certain instances of dative case (Yip et al. 1987; Marantz 1991; Baker 2015). In the fourth paper, I that inverse case attraction, a phenomenon where the head of a relative clause is marked with the case of the gap inside the relative …
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Clause structure, agreement and case in Gitksan
… researchers to claim that Gitksan is either an ergative or a non-configurational language, but I argue that these surface characteristics do not provide compelling evidence that Gitksan should be assigned any divergent type of syntactic structure. On the contrary, I show that there is syntactic …
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