Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 27, Special volume on Ergativity PSEUDO-ERGATIVITY IN CHUKOTKO-KAMCHATKAN AGREEMENT SYSTEMS 1

• Main Authors: Jonathan David Bobaljik, Harvard Mcgill
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1997
• Subjects: Alutor; Chukchi; Itelmen; Koryak
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.463.5477; http://web.uconn.edu/bobaljik/papers/PsErg.pdf

Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages seem to display a peculiar split agreement pattern, in which NOMINATIVE-oriented prefixes co-occur with ABSOLUTIVE-oriented suffixes. I argue that this characterization is misleading, and that the proper analysis takes the agreement systems to reflect a fundamentally NOMINATIVE-ACCUSATIVE, i.e., SUBJECT-OBJECT, alignment in these languages. Evidence for this comes in part from the inventory of agreement morphemes. Though suffixes often reflect either an intransitive subject (S) or an object (O), there are no individual suffixes which group these together: with one exception, suffixes systematically distinguish S from O arguments, either in form or in position. The appearance of simultaneous prefix and suffix agreement with intransitive subjects arises from a morphological requirement that both positions be filled, causing the subject features to be, in essence, copied to the suffix slot when no object is available to contribute features. For Itelmen, this is independently motivated (see Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 1997) by the distribution of agreement suffixes for third person direct objects—as they contribute no person features, those of the subject are copied in. The Chukotko-Kamchatkan [C-K] languages (Chukchi, Alutor, Kerek, Koryak and Alutor)