Speaker: Emily Drummond (UC Berkeley)
Date and time: Thursday March 3, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461, https://mit.zoom.us/j/97228947368
Title: Syntactic ergativity in Nukuoro
Abstract: The typology of ergative systems is constrained in several well-known ways, including i) Dixon’s (1994) generalization that no language is syntactically ergative without being morphologically ergative; and ii) Mahajan’s (1994, 1997) generalization that no ergative language has SVO word order. Based on primary fieldwork, I show that Nukuoro (Polynesian Outlier; Micronesia) is a counterexample to both of these generalizations, showing a pattern of syntactic ergativity without morphological ergativity in addition to having basic SVO word order. Despite this unusual cluster of properties, I argue that the Nukuoro extraction restriction can be explained using a familiar mechanism, namely systematic object inversion for nominal licensing (e.g., Coon et al. 2014; Ershova 2019). To account for Dixon’s generalization, I propose that ergative extraction restrictions are sensitive to abstract ergative Case, both in Nukuoro and cross-linguistically, as predicted by nearly all going analyses of such restrictions (Deal 2016, Polinsky 2017). Furthermore, I suggest that Nukuoro pre-verbal subjects are base-generated in the left periphery and control an empty category in Spec,vP, making SVO word order possible despite a restriction on ergative extraction.