ergative to accusative alignment

[Hewitt, Stephen]

Dear Raheleh,

Georgian is thought to have originally been ergative-absolutive, but then to have developed a nominative-accusative (dative) aligned present-future series of tenses through a process of anti-passivization, while maintaining the original ergative alignment in the aorist tense series with agentive verbs only.


Harris, Alice C. (1982): From ergative to active in Georgian, in: Aronson, Howard I. & Darden, Bill J. (eds.), Papers from the Second Conference on the Non-Slavic Languages of the USSR - Folia Slavica 5, 191-205.

Harris, Alice C. (1985): Diachronic syntax: The Kartvelian case. Orlando: Academic Press.

Harris, Alice C. (1991): Overview on the history of the Kartvelian languages, in: Harris, Alice C. (ed.), The indigenous languages of the Caucasus, Vol. I, Kartvelian languages: Delmar, New York: Caravan Books, 7-83.

Harris, Alice C. (2008): On the explanation of typologically unusual structures, in: Good, Jeff (ed.), Linguistic universals and language change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54-76.

Best

Steve Hewitt

From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Raheleh Izadi Far
Sent: 08 January 2014 13:25
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: ergative to accusative alignment

Dear all,
Does anybody know about languages which have changed from ergative alignment to accusative alignment? or does anybody know about the mechanisms involved in such a change? what are the studies concerning this issue? and if there are any, are they accessible online?
Thank you very much in advance
kind regards,
Raheleh Izadifar
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