Ergativity in North Russian: The Structure of a Nominalized Verb

• Main Author: Hakyung Jung
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.489.4688; http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~jungslav/fdsl/fdsl7/abstracts/Jung_FA.pdf

others. In their work, ergativity is roughly equated with the lack of the Acc case, which is ascribed to nominalization (e.g., deficient v). However, given that the object can actually appear in the Acc under certain conditions in ergative languages such as Hindi, their proposals do not completely account for ergative phenomena. In this paper, I argue that in North Russian ergatvity is encoded in the structure of the be-possessive perfect construction via different types of nominalization of the participle clause. The proposed structures for the North Russian perfect may be extended to ergative constructions in languages such as Hindi and Inuit. 2