The acquisition of ergative languages

Abstract

Ergative languages have challenged the ingenuity of linguists for more than a century. This article explores learnability problems associated with the acquisition of ergative languages. Traditionally, an ergative language is one which treats the subjects of intransitive verbs in the same way as the objects of transitive verbs. Languages may have rules which operate on a morphologically or syntactically ergative basis, but all languages are syntactically accusative to some extent. Both types of ergativity raise problems for language-acquisition theory. Children acquiring ergative morphologies must learn to distinguish between the subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs. Acquisition data suggest that children acquire ergative and accusative morphological systems equally easily. This finding supports a distributional learning procedure. Learnability considerations rule out the existence of syntactically ergative languages in the sense of Marantzs (1984) ergativity hypothesis. Unambiguous evidence of syntactic ergativity only appears in complex sentences; thus, children cannot use data within simple, active sentences to establish whether or not their language is syntactically ergative. Children acquiring languages with ergative syntactic constructions must learn when the direct object of a transitive verb functions as a syntactic pivot. Acquisition data for ergative syntactic constructions in K'iche' and Kaluli suggest that children initially fail to recognize ergative constraints on syntactic rules. This finding supports semantic bootstrapping as an acquisition mechanism for the initial construction of syntactic structure.