S-Lab - Penelope Daniel / Split-S, generalized
S-Lab - Penelope Daniel / Split-S, generalized
Monday February 23, Penelope leads S-Lab, proposing an extension to nominative/accusative languages of split-S alignment, a paradigm well known among ergative/absolutive languages.
Most nominative-accusative (NOM-ACC) languages obey Burzio's Generalization, which states that only verbs that assign an external argument (EA) theta-role can assign ACC case (Burzio 1986). In some languages, however, ACC can sometimes be assigned to the sole internal argument (IA) of an intransitive verb, even though there is no EA. While these exceptions may be surprising, I argue that they are actually the NOM-ACC counterpart to an alignment pattern that is well-known among ergative-absolutive ERG-ABS languages: split-S alignment. I will show that treating the ERG-ABS and NOM-ACC counterparts of split-S alignment as the same phenomenon yields new insights into both of these patterns. Specifically, I propose that variation between split-S and non-split patterns across both ERG-ABS and NOM-ACC languages can be derived by extending the Voice-bundling parameter (Pylkkänen 2008), which has primarily been investigated in NOM-ACC languages, to ERG-ABS languages.