Abstract for Amy Rose Deal's talk

Ergative case and the transitive subject: a view from Nez Perce
Amy Rose Deal (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
September 25, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Ergative case, the special case of transitive subjects, raises questions not only for the theory of case but also for theories of subjecthood and transitivity. This paper analyzes the case system of Nez Perce, a "three-way ergative" language, with an eye towards a formalization of the category of transitive subject. Current accounts of ergativity cannot capture the Nez Perce transitivity condition either because they presuppose an ergative-absolutive contrast which Nez Perce lacks or because they adopt too simplistic a view of transitivity (i.a. Yip, Maling and Jackendoff 1987, Marantz 1991, Dixon 1994, Woolford 1997, Legate to appear). I show that it is object agreement that is determinative of transitivity, and hence of ergative case, in Nez Perce. I further show that the transitivity condition on ergative case must be coupled with a criterion of subjecthood that makes reference to agreement with a high functional head (T/I/AgrS), not just to origin in a high argument-structural position. These two results suggest a formalization of the transitive subject as that argument uniquely accessing both high and low agreement information, the former through its (agreement-derived) connection with T/I/AgrS and the latter through its origin in the specifier of a head associated with object agreement (v).