As is well-known, many languages with ergative systems of case or agreement nonetheless
exhibit splits in their alignment, with ergativity failing to occur in some contexts.
Viewpoint aspect is a common determinant of such splits, with perfective aspect being
associated with ergative alignment, and imperfective (or specifically progressive) aspect
being associated with its absence (Moravcsik, 1978; Silverstein, 1976).
Recent work on aspect-driven splits has focused on properties of the imperfective, arguing
that it is associated with structures that disrupt otherwise-available mechanisms of ergative
alignment (Laka, 2006; Coon, 2010, 2013).
This talk focuses instead on the syntax of the perfective, arguing that in some languages
it is the perfective aspectual head itself that licenses ergative case. I argue specifically
that ergative alignment in Hindi-Urdu arises from the intersection of two different ways of
expressing perfective aspect, each attested independently in other languages. The first is
the use of oblique case to mark perfect or perfective subjects, found in languages such as
North Russian (Jung, 2011; Serˇzant, 2012), Estonian (Lindstr¨om and Tragel, 2010), and the
Kartvelian dialect Mingrelian (Tuite, 1998). The second is a morphosyntactic sensitivity to
transitivity, a hallmark of auxiliary selection in Germanic and Romance languages, whose
parallels to ergativity in Hindi-Urdu were first noted by Mahajan (1997). Ergativity of
the type found in Hindi-Urdu fits naturally into this typological picture – but only if the
licensing of ergative case is tied directly to perfective aspect, rather than disrupted by a
structurally complex imperfective.
The result is a more unified view of the morphosyntax of perfective aspect, at the cost
of a unified account of aspectually split ergativity. In particular, the proposal cannot
be extended to languages such as Basque, where both imperfective and perfective aspect
show 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 encode
aspectual contrasts: in particular, languages may vary in whether perfective or imperfective
aspect 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 the
question of how to account for their uniform directionality: if imperfective and perfective
aspects can be represented in different ways, it is a challenge to explain why they pattern
consistently in ergative splits.