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Tagged with ergativity linguistic-universals
3 questions
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Do different alignments restrict what kind of word order a language can have?
I've read somewhere that all known ergative languages are either verb-initial, or verb-final. I find this surprising, but I don't know of any counter-examples.
I've seen plenty of nominative ...
user19661
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About the universality of the notion of subject and the description of ergativity
A very common description of ergativity defines it as a morphosyntactic alignment where the intransitive subject follows a pattern similar to the object and dissimilar from the transitive subject --- ...
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Is there any evidence pro/contra Du Bois' Preferred Argument Structure (ergative patterning in discourse)?
In The Discourse Basis of Ergativity published in Language in 1987, John W. Du Bois proposed a theory which stated that (p. 850)
[universally] the distribution of new information vs. old ...
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