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The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Ling-Lunch 11/19: Omer Preminger

Please join us for Ling-lunch this week:

Speaker: Omer Preminger
Time: Thurs 11/19, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: On the nature of ergativity: New and old evidence from Basque

Basque unergatives have long been held as evidence that unergatives have an implicit object (Hale & Keyser 1993). Recently, I have argued that the presence of absolutive agreement-morphology in Basque is by no means an indication of an agreement relation being successfully established with a nominal target (Preminger 2009, LI). Building on this, I present two new arguments (and one old one) that Basque unergatives systematically lack an implicit object.

Since the single argument of these predicates is nonetheless marked with ergative Case, these facts furnish an argument against ergative in Basque adhering to a Case-competition logic (i.e., against ergative in Basque being “dependent Case”; Marantz 1991). At first glance, this seems to favor an account of ergative as inherent Case (Woolford 1997, Legate 2008, among others). However, there is evidence internal to Basque which casts doubt on such an account: (i) raising-to-ergative constructions (Artiagoitia 2001), and (ii) the existence of ergative Theme arguments (Etxepare 2003, Holguín 2007, among others).

In response to these facts, I propose a slight variation on the inherent Case theory of ergativity: ergative Case is still assigned in [Spec,vP], but [Spec,vP] is not unambiguously a base-generation site; it can be the target of movement, as well. If a DP is base-generated in [Spec,vP], it will receive not only ergative Case, but also an Agent theta-role; but if a DP moves into [Spec,vP], it will get ergative Case but retain whatever theta-role it already had.