This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The authors are specialists on one or more ergative language(s), on which many of them have produced grammatical descriptions. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now. Geographical regions covered are the Americas, the Caucasus, Asia, and Near East.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1;List of contributors;7 2;Introduction;9 3;Ergativity and voice in Mayan languages: a functional-typological approach;23 4;Ergativity and the passive in three Mayan languages;59 5;A tale of two passives in Cavineña;119 6;The detransitive voice in Kryz;141 7;Laz middle voice;173 8;Argument demotion in Japhug Rgyalrong;207 9;The Katukina-Kanamari antipassive;235 10;Undergoer orientation in Movima;267 11;Case patterns and verb classes in Trumai;297 12;Ergativity in the Adyghe system of valency-changing derivations;331 13;The evolution of transitive verbs in Basque and emergence of dative-marked patients;363 14;Index of subjects;389 15;Index of languages;395
