An Overview of Ergative Phenomena and Their Implications for Language Acquisition

Children can learn any language with equal facility, it is essential that data from as typologically wide a range of languages as possible inform theory construction. Languages like English and German are extremely consistent in the accusative patterning of their morphology and syntax, whereas only a tiny minority of ergative languages are so consistent. The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition is crucial to the formulation of adequate theories of how children acquire their native language. Languages exhibiting ergative patterns in these areas of grammar pose a significant challenge to acquisition theorists, for they present a number of morphosyntactic phenomena which call into question standard assumptions about the relationship of semantic roles to grammatical relations and about what case marking marks. The chapter provides an overview of ergative grammatical phenomena and points out their importance for aspects of the acquisition of grammar. Syntactic ergativity is much rarer than morphological ergativity, and it is always part of a split syntactic system.