Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz (MIT) and Valentina Dedyk (Kamchatkan Institute for the Development of Education)
Title: Some Consequences of the Mere Syncretism of the Ergative and Instrumental in Koryak
Time: Wednesday, November 10th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Abstract: The Chukotkan languages are described as having a consistent ergative-instrumental syncretism. This is problematic for some versions of case containment (Caha 2009 et seq.), because the syncretism in question excludes the genitive, dative, and locative cases. It’s also been claimed that not only are the ergative and instrumental syncretic in these languages, but that they are in fact one and the same morphosyntactic category, a problem for the view that ergative is a dependent case in Chukotkan (Baker and Bobaljik 2017; Abramovitz 2021). In this talk, we first argue that the ergative and instrumental are both distinct syntactic categories and distinct morphological ones in Chawchuven Koryak. This is based on the novel observation that the ergative-instrumental syncretism is not found on 2nd-declension nouns and personal pronouns; in fact, we find a systematic paradigm gap in the instrumental case forms of those nouns. Based on this, we show that a curious mismatch between the pattern of case-marking on the subjects of nominalizations and non-nominalized verbs is accounted for: whereas the subjects of normal verbs are marked according to a dependent ergative pattern, the subjects of nominalizations are marked according to what seems to be an inherent ergative (?) pattern. Specifically, the case of the agentive subject of a nominalization is the instrumental, which is usually (though not always) syncretic with the ergative.
Then we get to some stuff that we don’t understand very well. First, how can we encode the fact that there is no instrumental form of second-declension nouns and personal pronouns, a gap that seems to be only expressible in paradigmatic terms, and is therefore predicted not to exist in theories like DM? Second, are inflectional classes (declensions) the right way to think about Koryak nouns, given that: 1) they are mostly (entirely?) predictable based on a noun’s denotation, and 2) most nouns that belong to the 2nd declension can also inflect like 1st declension nouns, with seemingly no change in meaning (pace Zhukova 1972)?