Jessica Coon will be giving a brown bag on Friday April 17th at 1:30 in the Linguistics department conference room.
Title: Predicate Fronting and its Consequences: Ergativity in Chol
Abstract:
Nominalization has been linked to ergativity in a variety of unrelated languages (Johns 1992; Alexiadou 2001; Salanova 2007). In Chol (Mayan) we seem at first glance to find a typical aspectually-based ergative split: while clauses marked with the perfective aspect follow an ergative-absolutive pattern, imperfective and progressive clauses show what appears to be a nominative-accusative pattern. However, while the ergative-patterning perfective clauses in Chol involve truly verbal stems, the accusative-patterning non-perfective forms are argued to involve stems which are formally nominal. If nominalization results in ergativity, this is the opposite of what we expect.
In this talk I argue first that all main predicates in Chol in fact show an ergative-absolutive pattern, and that the apparent split is an illusion. The appearance of a nominative-accusative pattern in the non-perfective aspects is the result of nominalization and subordination of the main predicate (see also Laka 2006 on Basque), coupled with the fact that ergative and genitive are marked identically in Mayan languages. I suggest further, developing joint work with Andrés Salanova, that ergativity in Chol may have the same source as ergativity in languages which show ergative patterns in nominalizations: namely, both may be the result of a disconnect between v and T (Coon & Salanova 2009). In Chol, I propose that this disconnect is due to phrasal predicate fronting, coupled with the absence of prior v-to-T head-movement