Omer on extraction and Case in Mayan
March 25, 2015
Linguistics
Just out in
Linguistic Variation, "The role of case in A-bar extraction asymmetries: Evidence from Mayan," by Jessica Coon, Pedro Mateo Pedro and our own
Omer Preminger. The paper asks why, in some morphologically ergative languages but not others, ergative subjects cannot be extracted. It answers that this reflects, not properties of the ergative subject itself, but rather locality properties of
absolutive case assignment. It then argues that the Agent Focus construction in
Q'anjob'al, a Mayan language of Guatemala, circumvents the restriction by assigning case to internal arguments.
