| This dissertation considers the proper treatment of syntactic ergativity, arguing for a framework that decouples prominence at the levels of grammatical relations and argument structure. The result is two notions of subject: grammatical subject and argument structure subject (as in Schachter (1977) and Guilfoyle, Hung and Travis (1992)), and a uniform analysis of syntactically ergative and Philippine languages. Both these language groups allow an inverse mapping in the prominence of the two highest terms between argument structure and grammatical relations. A level of argument structure, although appearing in much recent work, is shown to be particularly well motivated by the examination of ergative languages. A study of Inuit, Tagalog, Dyirbal, and other languages shows that constraints on imperative addressee and controllee selection, antecedent of anaphors, and the controller of certain adverbial clauses are universally sensitive to argument structure. Thus these phenomena are always accusative or neutral, and we can explain why passive agents and causees can generally bind reflexives. However, constraints on relativization, topicalization, focussing or questioning, specificity or wide scope, coreferential omission in coordination, etc., are shown to be universally sensitive to grammatical relations. Examining just these phenomena, which are sensitive to grammatical relations, we see that many languages are indeed syntactically ergative, and so this option must be countenanced by linguistic theory. |
