Ergativity

This book provides a full survey of the various types of ergativity, looking at the ways they interrelate, their semantic bases and their role in the organisation of discourse.

1. Introduction; 2. Syntactically-based and semantically-based marking; 3. Intra-clausal or morphological ergativity; 4. Types of split system; 5. The category of 'subject'; 6. Inter-clausal or syntactic ergativity; 7. Language change; 8. The rationale for ergativity; Appendix; A note on theoretical models; References; Indexes.