Abstract
This is a portion of the report the author presented at the Symposium “On Ergativity” held at the University of Tsukuba on June 14th, 1986, on the occasion of the 92nd General Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan. It summarizes where and how ergativity manifests itself in the structure of Alaskan Yupik Eskimo, and the remaining portion which dealt with the case assignment will be published in a separate paper.
Lexical ergativity (as termed by B. Comrie) is crucial to the classification of Yupik binominal verbs into agentive and non-agentive, which in turn is highly relevant to a number of syntactic phenomena.‘Halftransitive’ verbs, i. e., anti-passive verbs from non-agentive binominal verbs are to be adequately understood in view of the adversative experiencer verbs. Attention is paid to the semantic difference between ergative and anti-passive constructions.
Morphologically the language is remarkably ergative in that intransitive subjects and transitive objects occur in the absolutive case and transitive subjects in the relative except for the nouns referring to the first or second person which occur in the locative case instead of the absolutive. Dual and plural nouns without person markers and the first and second person pronouns lack formal distinction between the absolutive and the relative, hence the neutral pattern. Person markers in verbs manifest not only the ergative but also the accusative and the neutral pattern mainly depending upon the person. Syntactically the language is accusative except for one type of relativization made on an absolutive noun.
The ergative pattern of case assignment should be viewed in terms of nominal hierarchy together with case promotion and demotion. It will be shown in a separate paper that the voice phenomena in which a number of nominals in addition to the more fundamental S, P, and A are involved is a process of foregrounding a certain nominal to be spotlit in the form of the absolutive case.
