Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations. CHRISTOPHER D.

• Main Authors: Reviewed Jeffrey, T. Runner
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: greenlandic; inuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.216.5156; http://ling.rochester.edu/people/runner/dnload/Ergativity.pdf

dissertation. As a syntactician who is not an expert on ergativity I enjoyed the book, finding it clearly written and carefully argued. While a large amount of data is included to back up the empirical claims made, it is carefully presented not to overwhelm the reader. Also, while one of the central thrusts is a theoretical one, the claims are made in as theory-neutral a way as possible, making this book useful to linguists of various stripes. Part 1, Cutting the Ergative Pie, outlines the core claims of the book, backed up by various theoretical and empirical cross-linguistic considerations; Part 2, Inuit (West Greenlandic), is an in-depth look at Inuit, a well-studied ergative language; there Manning compares his account of ergativity to others from the literature. The basic claim is that a syntactic representation is organized into two levels of information: grammatical relations structure (gr-structure) and argument structure (astructure) and that one locus of variation among languages is in the linking between the two levels of representation. Gr-structure corresponds roughly to a surface level of grammatical relations, like the final grammatical relations of Relational Grammar (RG), the level of f-structure in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), or the level of S-structure