Abstract for Daniel Kaufman's talk

Nominality and genitive alignment in Austronesian languages
Daniel Kaufman (Cornell University)
February 19, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Philippine-type languages have posed perennial puzzles for both alignment typology and syntactic theory. On the one hand, the P argument of the canonical transitive is marked with the same case as the S argument of an intransitive predicate, but on the other hand, unlike other well accepted ergative languages, there is no morphologically unmarked transitive. Rather, there are a wide range of voices which are all equally morphologically marked and which are syntactically symmetric in the sense that they promote a single argument (or adjunct) to subject. Only very rarely do we find anything like “3>2 promotion” in Philippine languages, a fact which does not necessarily fall out from being of the ergative type. In this talk, I will attempt to transcend the Austronesian ergative-accusative debate and show that these languages, while possibly being a subtype of the ergative kind, are more fruitfully understood as possessing “genitive alignment”. Genitive alignment arises historically from the reanalysis of nominalizations as canonical event-type predications, a reanalysis which leads to the genitive-agentive syncretism found in several ergative type languages (Eskimo, Cariban, Mayan and a small handful of others). Understanding what appear to be verbal predications in contemporary Philippine languages as still possessing nominal syntax explains an extremely broad constellation of facts which are otherwise impossible to bring together under more typical ergative or accusative analyses. Finally, I will show that the diachronic erosion of proto-nominality in Indonesian languages has led to exactly the expected convergence with more typical ergative and accusative type languages.