Ergative marking

In the discussion of English and other languages in 1.2.2, it was seen that Agents and Patients (and, indirectly, Subjects and Objects) are distinguished in terms of:

1. (i) word order,

2. (ii) morphology of the noun or pronoun,

3. (iii) agreement with the verb.

The use of the term ‘Subject’ implies, of course, the identification of S and A (in active sentences), that identification being made in terms of these criteria. There are, however, languages in which S is identified with P (using the same criteria), these being generally known as ‘ergative languages’, though as argued in 1.3.1 (and see below) we should talk rather about ‘ergative systems’.

It may be that there are languages in which ergativity is marked by word order, i.e. where S and P occupy the same position but a different one from that of A. This distinction would not be possible in languages where both A and P precede or follow the verb (and this covers very many languages of the world), because in such languages A and P have different positions only i relation to each other, but it would be possible if one of the terms preceded, and the other followed, the verb.

In 1.3.1, Dyirbal was given as an example of a language with an ergative system, ergativity being shown in the morphology of the noun: A alone is in the ergative case (with suffix -ngu), while both P and S are in the (unmarked) absolutive case.