著者

八代 隆政

出版者

文教大学大学院言語文化研究科付属言語文化研究所

雑誌

言語と文化 = Language and Culture (ISSN:09147977)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.12, pp.88-114, 2000-03-01

---

Given transitive and intransitive sentence constructions, there are ideally two types of languages; nominative-accusative languages and ergative-absolutive languages. In a nominative-accusative language like Latin, the subject of an intransitive verb is functionally identified in some manner with the subject of a transitive verb, and two are referred to as nominative case. In an ergative-absolutive language, commonly termed merely 'ergative language', there is a functional identity between the subject of an intransitive and the object of a transitive; these two are termed absolutives or absolutive case. The subject of a transitive verb, called the ergative case or ergative, is distinct.A good number of ergative languages, which are generally referred to as split ergative languages, assign varying case-marking patterns on the basis of tense or aspect. For example, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi show the ergative-absolutive patterning only in the perfect aspect. Pashto accepts the nominative-accusative construction in the non-past tense and the ergative-absolutive construction in the past tense.This paper is devoted to a consideration of the split ergative phenomenon in Urdu and Pashto. The first two sections show certain general characteristics that have been noted in ergative and split ergative languages. Section 3 covers some matters related to the ergativity of these two languages ranging from morphological to syntactic. Section 4 examines the particular features in Urdu's perfect aspect of the case-marking pattern based on the semantics of the verb, with volitional verbs requiring the ergative-absolutive pattern and non-volitional verbs being of the nominative-accusative pattern.