AW: ergative to accusative alignment

[Felicity Meakins]

Dear Raheleh,

One mechanism might be language contact. The Gurindji ergative marker became a nominative marker as a result of contact with Kriol in the formation of Gurindji Kriol which is a mixed language. This change had an intermediate stage whereby Gurindji Kriol was originally an optional ergative language and then became a (optional) marked nominative language (as the ergative marker extended to subjects of transitive clauses).


Meakins, Felicity. 2009. The case of the shifty ergative marker: A pragmatic shift in the ergative marker in one Australian mixed language. In Jóhanna Barddal & Shobhana Chelliah (eds.), The Role of Semantics and Pragmatics in the Development of Case. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 59-91.

---. to appear. From absolutely optional to only nominally ergative: The life cycle of the Gurindji Kriol ergative suffix. In Nino Amiridze, Peter Arkadiev & Francesco Gardani (eds.), Borrowed Morphology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Meakins, Felicity & Carmel O'Shannessy. 2010. Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages. Lingua 120.7: 1693–713.

Felicity
_________________________________________
FELICITY MEAKINS  | ARC Research Fellow
Linguistics | SLCCS | University of Queensland |
Brisbane QLD 4072 | AUSTRALIA
RM 517 | Gordon Greenwood Bldg (32) |
' +61 7 3365 2877 | ' +61 411 404 546 | 7 +61 7 3365 6799 | • f.meakins at uq.edu.au<mailto:f.meakins at uq.edu.au> |
web www.slccs.uq.edu.au//index.html?page=127733&pid=124851
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20140109/3f457689/attachment.htm>