Universals Reading Group: Bronwyn Bjorkman
Date and Time
April 16, 2014
05:15PM - 07:00PM EDT
Location
2 Arrow Street
ABSTRACT:As is well-known, many languages with ergative systems of case or agreement nonethelessexhibit splits in their alignment, with ergativity failing to occur in some contexts.Viewpoint aspect is a common determinant of such splits, with perfective aspect beingassociated with ergative alignment, and imperfective (or specifically progressive) aspectbeing associated with its absence (Moravcsik, 1978; Silverstein, 1976). Recent work on aspect-driven splits has focused on properties of the imperfective, arguingthat it is associated with structures that disrupt otherwise-available mechanisms of ergativealignment (Laka, 2006; Coon, 2010, 2013). This talk focuses instead on the syntax of the perfective, arguing that in some languagesit is the perfective aspectual head itself that licenses ergative case. I argue specificallythat ergative alignment in Hindi-Urdu arises from the intersection of two different ways ofexpressing perfective aspect, each attested independently in other languages. The first isthe use of oblique case to mark perfect or perfective subjects, found in languages such asNorth Russian (Jung, 2011; Serˇzant, 2012), Estonian (Lindstr¨om and Tragel, 2010), and theKartvelian dialect Mingrelian (Tuite, 1998). The second is a morphosyntactic sensitivity totransitivity, a hallmark of auxiliary selection in Germanic and Romance languages, whoseparallels to ergativity in Hindi-Urdu were first noted by Mahajan (1997). Ergativity ofthe type found in Hindi-Urdu fits naturally into this typological picture – but only if thelicensing of ergative case is tied directly to perfective aspect, rather than disrupted by astructurally complex imperfective. The result is a more unified view of the morphosyntax of perfective aspect, at the costof a unified account of aspectually split ergativity. In particular, the proposal cannotbe extended to languages such as Basque, where both imperfective and perfective aspectshow ergative alignment, with only progressive contexts being non-ergative (Laka, 2006).This result is consistent with work suggesting that languages can vary in how they encodeaspectual contrasts: in particular, languages may vary in whether perfective or imperfectiveaspect is the more featurally or structurally complex (Dahl, 1985; Comrie, 1976; Bjorkman,2011; Cowper, 2005, a.o). For work on aspectual splits, however, this leaves open thequestion of how to account for their uniform directionality: if imperfective and perfectiveaspects can be represented in different ways, it is a challenge to explain why they patternconsistently in ergative splits.