When you have a sentence like "I visit them", the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from "they visit me". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or "Laugh me". And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like "laugh" patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb like "visit". This pattern is known as ergativity.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about ergativity! We talk about how ergativity first brought us together as collaborators (true facts: Lingthusiasm might never have existed without it), some classic examples of ergatives from Basque and Arrente, and cool downstream effects that ergativity makes possible, including languages that have ergatives sometimes but not other times (aka split ergativity) and the gloriously-named antipassive (the opposite of the passive). We also introduce a handy mnemonic gesture for remembering what ergativity looks like, as part of our ongoing quest to encourage you to make fun gestures in public!
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
November is Lingthusiasm's anniversary month and it's been 7 years! To help us celebrate we’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, so we're asking you to share a link to your favourite episode, or just share Lingthusiasm in general. Tag us on on social media so we can thank you, or if you share in private enjoy the warm fuzzies of our gratitude.
We’re doing our second listener survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year's survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here.
In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistic summer camps for grownups aka linguistics institutes! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Take the Lingthusiasm 2023 survey here!
Lingthusiasm episode 'Colour words around the world and inside your brain'
Lingthusiasm episode 'How to rebalance a lopsided conversation'
'Before we get to ergativity, unaccusitivity and other kinds of morphosyntactic funtimes…' the 2014 blog post by Superlinguo that started Lauren and Gretchen's collaboration
xkcd comic 'Tower of Babel'
Etymonline entry for 'ergative'
Grambank entry 'Feature GB409: Is there any ergative alignment of flagging?'
WALS entry 'Chapter Alignment of Case Marking of Pronouns'
WALS entry 'Chapter Alignment of Case Marking of Full Noun Phrases'
Wikipedia entry for 'ergative–absolutive alignment'
Wikiversity entry for 'A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman) Ergative case'
Wikipedia entry for 'tripartite alignment'
Wikipedia entry for 'antipassive voice'
Wikipedia entry for 'split ergativity'
Lingthusiasm episode 'Word order, we love'
Lingthusiasm episode 'The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on'
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
...Many verbs that have no patient semantically can nevertheless be coded syntactically as transitive. That is, they can take a direct object that is semantically not a patient. English is indeed rather tolerant of metaphoric transitive expressions involving less-transitive verbs. But the converse process also occurs. That is, many semantically-transitive
verbs that typically take a patient direct-object can also be used — in some discourse contexts — without their object. They thus appear syntactically as intransitive verbs. In most cases of this kind, the object is in some sense implied. However, it is either stereotypical, habitual, predictable, non-referring — or simply unimportant.
-English Grammar: a Function-based Introduction vol. 1 by T. Givón
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Ergativity delights us’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about ergativity. But first, next month, November, is Lingthusiasm’s anniversary month. It’s been seven years!
Lauren: For our anniversary month, we ask you to share your favourite episode or just share some lingthusiasm in general. Most people still find podcasts through word-of-mouth, and a lot of them don’t yet realise they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month.
Gretchen: Or in their eyes since all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts. We’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast if only they knew it existed.
Lauren: The other day, I shared our colour episode with a stylist because we were talking about the strange history of the colour orange. It’s so fun to find that perfect episode to recommend to someone, and we’ve touched on so many different topics over the last seven years.
Gretchen: I’m always sending people to our episode on turn-taking and conversational styles because there’s this comment that keeps coming up on social media about having to hold up the entire conversation by yourselves or not being able to get a word in edgewise. That’s a linguistics thing that’s been described. You can listen to an episode about it.
Lauren: We’ve asked you to do this every year on our anniversary, and we always see it in the stats. Your recommendations really do help more people find the show.
Gretchen: If you share us on social media, you can tag @lingthusiasm on basically all of the social media sites, so we can see it and reply, or like it, or reshare as appropriate. If you share it in private, we won’t necessarily know, but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction – or you can tell us about it on social media if you still wanna be thanked.
Lauren: In what is becoming another anniversary tradition, we are doing our second listener survey this year. This is our chance to learn all about your linguistic interests, and we have a new set of linguistics experiments for you to contribute to.
Gretchen: If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again. You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode, and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year.
Lauren: This year, we also wrote an academic article about the process of making Lingthusiasm, which featured some of your answers from the previous survey. You are officially contributing to academic research. Because of this, we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey.
Gretchen: To do the survey, or read more details, go to bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23. That’s all lowercase and with the numbers in their numeric values – not written out as words.
Lauren: Or follow the links from our website and social media. Our most recent bonus episode was a recap of Gretchen’s time at the 2023 Linguistics Institute, which is a month-long linguistics summer course. Was I jealous? Yes. Was I delighted to hear about it? Yes. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and many other bonus episodes.
Gretchen: Our patrons really do let us keep making this podcast, so we really appreciate any level of support.
[Music]
Lauren: You know, Gretchen, in some ways, ergativity is the basis of our LingComm friendship.
Gretchen: You know, you’re right about that that. I think it started in 2014, right?
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: I had been getting a higher than usual number of questions about linguistics topics on my blog, AllThingsLinguistic, and I decided, “Look, I don’t have time to answer all of these, but I know that there are other linguists on Tumblr who do sometimes have areas of expertise that I don’t or maybe just have more time,” and so I put this post out saying, “I want to try to be a bit of a connecting point for people who have questions about linguistics topics that aren’t currently very well explained online and then to encourage people who had answers to those to either write a blog post or especially contribute to Wikipedia for those particular topics so that there’d be better information about various linguistics topics on the internet.”
Lauren: I was in grad school at the time, so while my supervisors probably thought I didn’t have the time, I certainly had the enthusiasm.
Gretchen: And someone had specifically asked a question about ergativity and said, “Look, I’ve read the Wikipedia articles about this, but I still feel confused. Can anybody help me understand this phenomenon?”
Lauren: Look, we can definitely say that this was to answer the question that someone had asked, but also, I found it really helpful to write this incredibly long-form, back-to-first-principles blog post about what ergativity is to really help keep it in my mind while I was working on some of my coursework for grad school. It benefitted everyone, and it also allowed me to see where there were some parts of the Wikipedia page that I could contribute to. Those edits are still up there as well.
Gretchen: Amazing. Subsequently, I did some more Wikipedia workshops, and I reached out to you to get involved with those because I saw that you had edited Wikipedia before, and I was like, “Ooo, this person seems responsible and reliable and maybe I can nerd snipe her into doing more things.”
Lauren: “She blogs. She wikipedias.”
Gretchen: Eventually, that led to the podcast.
Lauren: It’s all because I’m a bit of an ergative devotee.
Gretchen: An “ergativity devotee.”
Lauren: Indeed.
Gretchen: I recognise that we are saying the word “ergativity” a lot, and we’re not explaining what it is yet, and I promise we will get to that. I also want to point out that ergativity has a certain level of linguistic cultural cachet.
Lauren: This is true.
Gretchen: It’s a term that’s only used in linguistics. It’s one of those things that you can throw into conversation, and you’ll sound like you know some linguistics if you say it in an appropriate context. We are here to give you the ability to casually toss “ergativity” into conversation. My favourite example of that currently – although, who knows, there could be more examples in the future, I hope there are – is an xkcd comic called “The Tower of Babel.” I think we should narrate it.
Lauren: Okay, a dramatic reading of an xkcd comic. Let’s do this.
Gretchen: First of all, there’s more than two characters in this comic, so we’re just gonna – it’ll be fine.
Lauren: We’ll make it work. One of those characters, though, I should point out, is a curly-haired linguist.
Gretchen: Hmm.
Lauren: Who bears a striking resemblance to you.
Gretchen: I will be playing that character.
Lauren: Yes, Gretchen will be playing Gretchen.
Gretchen: Lauren will be playing all of the other characters.
Lauren: Correct. Okay. We ready?
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: “The Tower of Babel is complete!”
Gretchen: “Let’s go meet God!”
Lauren: “Hi, God.” (god voice) “Wow, nice tower! You did a great job! I’m so proud!”
Gretchen: “Thanks!”
Lauren: (god voice) “I’m going to give you a reward. What do you like about the world?”
Gretchen: “Hmm, words are really cool.”
Lauren: “No, wait –” (god voice) “Great! I’m going to give you lots of languages to study, each with its own phonology, word ordering, morphosyntactic alignment…”
Gretchen: “YESSSSSSS!”
Lauren: “We should not have brought a linguist.”
Gretchen: Technically, the curly-haired linguist character is not named, but I think of her as a kindred spirit. Morphosyntactic alignment is the broader concept that ergativity is an example of. This is gonna be an episode where you can listen to half an hour of explanations so you can understand two words in a comic strip. Are we ready?
Lauren: We are so ready. If you don’t retain every bit of detail about this, don’t worry. I was multiple years into a PhD before ergativity really clicked for me.
Gretchen: The thing to really retain is that sentences have this organising principle that’s different in different languages. If the exact details are something that takes a while to sink in, that’s totally okay.
Lauren: We are going to explore some cool languages doing cool stuff this episode.
Gretchen: All right. Let’s start with English, just to give ourselves a bit of grounding. When you have a sentence – let’s take a very basic sentence, “Gretchen visits Lauren,” which is a thing that has happened – and, obviously, we need to distinguish that from “Lauren visits Gretchen.”
Lauren: Which, in English, we do by the order that the words come in.
Gretchen: Right. This lets us know who’s going to Australia, who’s going to Canada, otherwise you could end up buying some very confusing airline tickets. We could also do a version of this sentence that doesn’t use names. You could say, “I visit them,” “They visit me.” Here we have both the word order and the form of the words themselves – “I” versus “me,” and “they” versus “them” – that’s telling us who’s doing what to who.
Lauren: Very convenient. Thank you, English pronouns, for helping here. If I visit them, I can say, “I arrive.” We have “I” at the start of each of those sentences. In English, we wouldn’t say, “Me arrive” or “Them arrive.”
Gretchen: But in principle, we could. It would be confusing if we started going around saying, “Me visit they” because then you wouldn’t know which of the clues to follow, but it actually is not confusing to say, “Me arrive,” or “Them arrive,” instead of “I arrive,” and “They arrive,” because there’s only one person or entity doing a thing in each of those sentences. When we have two different people or groups acting on each other, when we have two different roles in the sentence, we need to distinguish between them grammatically either with word order or by changing the shape of the word. When we only have one person or group – one role doing an action – then that solo entity can kind of cluster with either of the forms in the sentence where we have two of them.
Lauren: We should use some kind of visual metaphor here to help show the relationship between these three different roles that you can have in a sentence.
Gretchen: I first learned this relationship between roles by having somebody draw a little triangle on a piece of paper with these three different possible roles and doing a circle around which ones are clustered together in which language.
Lauren: I did that on my blog post. I love using some very nifty colour-coding when I teach this with slides, but we don’t have access to that.
Gretchen: This is an audio podcast. Instead, we thought we would send everybody something in the mail so you can have a visual.
Lauren: Oh, we could launch a massive advertising campaign. Imagine the day where we have morphosyntactic billboards in Times Square!
Gretchen: All of the bus shelters – we could just pay for advertising, so you can see this diagram if you’re listing to this podcast while you’re walking the dog.
Lauren: I think this may be getting out of hand here.
Gretchen: You know, because we have such a massive budget, Lauren.
Lauren: I’m gonna have to break the sad news to you that we’re gonna have to use something that is a little bit closer to home and a little bit more on budget.
Gretchen: Okay, let’s try – if you look at your hand.
Lauren: Or borrow someone else’s.
Gretchen: Borrow someone else’s consensually if you like. We can put these two people with their two roles in the one sentence on two different fingers. If we have “Gretchen visits Lauren,” we can put the doer, the visitor – that’s me – on the index finger, and the visitee – that’s you, Lauren – on the pinky finger.
Lauren: Great. I’ve got a little metal hand gesture here.
Gretchen: You’re sort of doing the horns thing. Then for the one person in the sentence all by itself, like, “I arrive,” the only thing acting, that’s gonna be on the thumb sticking out on its own.
Lauren: I like that because with “I arrive,” there’s only one role happening there. The thumb sticks out on its own.
Gretchen: Right. The thumb is its own solo player. We’re just ignoring the middle and the ring fingers. That’s a more complicated sentence for a future episode.
Lauren: There’re certainly other things you can put in a sentence, and we’re not gonna look at those things-slash-fingers right now.
Gretchen: But the nifty thing about this metaphor – so again, we’ve got the index finger, which is the visitor, the pinky finger, which is the visitee, and the arriving person over here on the thumb.
Lauren: “Arrivee.”
Gretchen: “Arrivee.” The thumb can touch the index finger, like when you’re making an “okay” sign. That represents when you group together “I arrive” and “I visit,” the way English does. Those are patterning together. You have the pinky finger that’s all by itself doing its own thing.
Lauren: That’s me.
Gretchen: You can also have the thumb touch flat against the pinky finger. The represents when the arrivee and the visitee are doing the same thing. That would be “visit me” and “me arrive” in a language that does something like that. Then the index finger is all by itself, and it’s doing its own thing. So, it’s doing, for example, “I.”
Lauren: You know what? It’s a lot more awkward for me to touch my index finger and my pinky finger together.
Gretchen: Right. Those don’t really touch together very well. You can brush the sides a bit, but they don’t touch flat as easily as the thumb does. That represents how you really don’t want to mark the two roles in the same sentence with the exact same marking because then you don’t know who’s visiting who.
Lauren: Defeats the purpose of distinguishing who’s doing what in a sentence.
Gretchen: Right. This is our visual metaphor using something that hopefully everybody has access to. Unfortunately, the Lingthusiasm budget does not stretch to billboards.
Lauren: No, but it does stretch to hoping that people have hands. The other thing that’s nifty about your metaphor, Gretchen, is that “okay” is a meaningful gesture in English in a way that touching the thumb and pinky together is not. You know the way that they line up in English is for the thumb and the index finger to go together – “I arrive” and “I visit Gretchen.”
Gretchen: Ah, because that’s a gesture that we have. I can’t guarantee that all of the cultures that do have the “okay” handshape do have this exact morphosyntactic alignment.
Lauren: It only works if you’re trying to remember things for an exam in English.
Gretchen: The other thing that’s the case, at least for me, is I find it’s a bit easier and more comfortable to tap my thumb to my index finger than to tap my thumb to my pinky. I feel like this represents, as a mnemonic, how this grouping of the visitor and the arrivee together is a bit more common cross-linguistically. The other one is still in a bunch of languages, and we’re gonna talk about that, but it’s a bit more common to have the index and the thumb grouped together.
Lauren: The other thing I really like about this is that putting the pinky and the thumb together is now, like, a cool, new linguist greeting.
Gretchen: Yeah. “Okay” already has a meaning, but the pinky-thumb together, this could be a cool, new linguistic handshape gesture. You could do a little tappity-tap of your thumb against your index and your pinky finger in succession. You could use this as a cool hand gesture to flag down linguists in public.
Lauren: Are you a fan of morphosyntactic alignment?
Gretchen: Yeah, it’s like the “Live long and prosper” gesture for linguistics.
Lauren: I love it.
Gretchen: Or if you’re at a bar, and you’re trying to find a discrete way of finding out if someone’s a linguist, and you don’t want to just ask them – I dunno why you wouldn’t just ask them – but you could do this little gesture.
Lauren: No, no, no, if you’re in a bar, and you wanna find all the linguists in a noisy environment is what you’re trying to say there.
Gretchen: Right, exactly, yeah. I hope this catches on. I did just make this up. I can’t guarantee other linguists will recognise it – but maybe! It seems pretty useful.
Lauren: In English, we tend to keep the thumb and the index finger together – “I visit Gretchen,” “I arrive.” In other languages, you can have it as the thumb and the pinky together, and it’s “Gretchen visits me” or “me arrive.” Even though that’s not the way it works in English, that is the way it works in other languages. That is known as “ergative.”
Gretchen: This whole thing is morphosyntactic alignment, and a part of this is ergativity. Specifically, we’re used to doing this default “okay” sign – the index and thumb together. This has a name. It’s called “nominative-accusative alignment” because those are the two different groups. Then the pinky and thumb together is called “ergative-absolutive alignment,” but it often just gets shortened to “ergativity” because that’s the most salient piece of this entire edifice. People tend to name the most exciting bit.
Lauren: Of course. You’ve got to stick with the exciting bits, Gretchen.
Gretchen: When you have the thumb and pinky touching, the person who’s visiting is left doing all of the work of packing their bags and getting on the flight, and the other people are just like, “I’m just here. I’m getting visited. I arrive. Who knows how that happens?” But the visitor has to do all of this stuff. So, the entity that’s doing all the work is called the “ergative.”
Lauren: The etymology of “ergative” – that “erg-” there – is from a Greek root that comes from the form “ergon,” which is “work.”
Gretchen: An “ergonomic” chair is, I guess, a chair that sort of works well for you.
Lauren: Huh, yeah, makes sense.
Gretchen: Or the “erg-” – which is pronounced slightly differently in “SYN-ergy,” “synergy,” /sɪnəɹgi/.
Lauren: /sɪnəɹgi/. I guess it is /sɪnəɹgi/.
Gretchen: Working together.
Lauren: Working together. That’s nice. There’s some real synergy to that etymology.
Gretchen: [Laughs] I think ultimately the Proto-Indo-European root, *werg, meaning “to do,” which is the origin of “erg-” as in “ergative” and “synergy” and also “energy” – “energy” does the work – is also the origin of the English word “work.”
Lauren: Cool. That was a fun little etymological rabbit hole to go down.
Gretchen: The ergative – or to use an Anglish root – the “work-ative.”
Lauren: The “work-ative.” That would be so good.
Gretchen: Why don’t we just call it the “work-ative” now?
Lauren: We already have enough going on here terminologically to not to re-Anglicise it. But it is one of those pieces of terminology that was created in the 20th Century as part of this formalisation of linguistic terminology. That’s why it has this Greek root, and also why it doesn’t show up in other branches of sciences because we didn’t borrow it from physics or biology. It was created within linguistics.
Gretchen: Right. Whereas compared to something like “morphology,” which refers to the shape of words but can also be used in metals and geography – the shapes of other things – “ergative” is specifically used for the grammatical concept and only the grammatical concept, so you really look like you know what you’re talking about if you can use this word.
Lauren: Let’s stop making up fake English ergatives and start looking at ergativity in some languages that actually have it as part of the grammar. I think we’ll just start with one of the poster children languages for ergativity, which is Basque.
Gretchen: Basque is a language that’s spoken in Europe but is not ancestrally related to any of the Indo-European languages. It’s not related to Spanish or Catalan or French or any of the languages that are spoken in that region of Spain and France. It’s also not related to Greek, which has this common ancestor with English, this “work” ergative “erg-” connection. It gets a lot of people very excited because it’s a language that’s convenient for people based in Europe to work on but is not related to the other languages in its neighbourhood, although, of course, it’s done a certain amount of borrowing because of contact later.
Lauren: First cool Basque fact – it’s an isolate. Second cool Basque fact – it has ergative when most other European languages don’t show anything like this.
Gretchen: Third cool Basque fact is, like you might expect for a language that is very different from all of the languages in its neighbourhood, it’s been undergoing language revitalisation movements since the 1970s and 1980s. We’re gonna talk a lot more about that in a very soon upcoming episode, so stay tuned for way more about Basque. But as the poster child for ergativity, let’s talk about what it specifically looks like.
Lauren: For our verb “arrived,” it looks very much like English. If we’re talking about Martin, “Martin etorri da” – “Martin has arrived.” But if we have a verb that has two roles in it – in this example, we have “Martin has seen Diego” – we have, “Martin-ek Diego ikusi du.” Here, we have this “-ek” on “Martin.”
Gretchen: Right. Because you have the “-ek,” which is the ergative marker, on the one solitary, “There’s ‘Martin’ being his index finger all alone,” compared to “Martin” with no marking on the end, and “Diego” with no marking on the end, which are the other form that’s called the “absolutive” – the one that isn’t doing as much of the work – and that’s the one that’s not ergative. Those are the two forms that are linked together – your pinky and your thumb touching each other.
Lauren: We see exactly the same pattern in the language Arrente, which is from Central Australia in the Northern Territory where if a child is sitting, the child is marked as “ampe,” but if a child is chasing a dog, it’s “ampe-le.” Again, there’s a suffix on the role that is doing something to something else. That index finger is marked different from the pinky finger and the thumb.
Gretchen: Again, we see something that’s very common with ergativity – and this makes sense when you think of an efficiency perspective. When you have just one role or one person – “the child,” “the dog,” “Martin” – doing something all by itself, you don’t need to add anything to the end of it to indicate who’s doing what to who. You can just say it, and it’s fine. It’s the case when you have two different entities, you need to mark at least one of them so that you can tell who’s doing what. You pick one to mark. For languages that are ergative, you pick the one that’s doing the action, and you mark that one. The other one is unmarked. Then implicitly for languages that are the other category, that aren’t ergative, you pick the one that’s being acted upon to add the marking to, although in English that’s less clear because we’re using word order and we’re using these relics of markings on the pronouns, so that’s not as clear in this case. But in the poster child ergative languages, it’s very clear that you have this one entity that’s got a suffix on it or, potentially, a prefix or something like that, and then the other one just doesn’t have any marking on it at all.
Lauren: You mentioned earlier that ergativity is not as common as the English style of marking. I thought this was a really good reason to visit our new friend Grambank and see in a big database of languages just how common each of these patterns were.
Gretchen: Before we visit Grambank, let’s just test our cross-linguistic intuitions. Do you think of ergativity as pretty common, not that common – what’s your sense of it just based on the languages you’re familiar with?
Lauren: I think of it as pretty common, but I know I have a bit of an area bias because I work in Nepal where there’re a lot of languages that have ergative marking, then being in Australia, a lot of my colleagues work on Australian languages and languages of Papua New Guinea, and it’s relatively common in those language groups as well. So, I think it’s common, but I think that’s my bias showing.
Gretchen: Well, yeah, because my gut feeling about ergativity is it’s not super common. I know it’s in the Mayan languages. We just talked with Pedro Mateo Pedro. The Mayan languages that he works on all have ergativity. And in Basque – which I talked with someone else who we’re gonna have an interview about shortly.
Lauren: Based on Lingthusiasm episodes this year, incredibly strong preference for ergativity.
Gretchen: That might be the reason we decided we needed an ergativity episode. I’m just gonna say. But other than that, I don’t feel like I have a lot of languages I could name off the top of my head that I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that one’s super ergative.”
Lauren: Well, let’s have a look at the numbers. There are around 1900 languages in this part of the Grambank database. 150 of those they couldn’t tell from the resources they had. Of the ones that are left, ergative is found in 390, and it’s not found in around 13-, 1400.
Gretchen: So, that’s about 400 with ergativity and 1400 without ergativity. That’s, I would say, quite a lot – not super common, but quite a lot, which is about what we thought between us.
Lauren: The great thing about Grambank is that there is a little interactive map you can zoom in on. When you zoom in, you can see that three real hotbeds of ergativity are the Nepal part of Southeast Asia, Australia, and then various little clusters in Papua New Guinea. I was pretty spot on about my areal bias.
Gretchen: There’s some in Central America, but not a ton, so there’s your Mayan languages.
Lauren: You can certainly see where Basque is in a map of Europe because it is an ergative language in a sea of not ergative languages.
Gretchen: There it is – right on the border of France and Spain. Ergativity – as if we weren’t having enough fun –
Lauren: More fun. More let’s have more fun.
Gretchen: Ergativity is also really neat because we’ve done basic ergativity, but it also shows up in different ways across different languages.
Lauren: It shows up in so many cool and different ways. It’s really one of those things like, if you’ve met one ergative language, you’ve met one ergative language.
Gretchen: The thing with ergativity is, again, it’s that clustering of the pinky finger and the thumb roles in the sentence, but some languages have that clustering in some contexts, and the more cross-linguistically common clustering of the index finger and thumb together in other contexts.
Lauren: These are languages that flip between those two different hand gestures in different contexts.
Gretchen: One of the reasons why the exciting version of the phenomenon that gets talked about is ergativity rather than nominativity, which is the English-y pattern, is that there’re lots of languages like English where you basically just have only these two entities patterning together. But languages that are ergative are often partially ergative, or what they call “split ergative,” so, again, that’s the exciting one. They often have a little bit of the other system in there as well.
Lauren: They can split in different ways, which is why it’s fun to look at ergativity in each individual language because they’re often doing slightly different things.
Gretchen: Do you have some examples of split ergative systems for us?
Lauren: I have so many examples of split ergative systems. I’m very excited to share with you. One that is actually common enough that the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures has different maps is that some languages will do ergativity in pronouns but not in common nouns – or the other way around. WALS actually has different maps for whether a language is ergative in nouns or ergative in pronouns.
Gretchen: I guess that sort of makes sense to me because English has – you know, pronouns change their shape depending on whether they’re the subject or the object or something, but our nouns really do not change their shape. You could imagine that but for ergatives.
Lauren: Yeah. Pronouns have their own history and way of being made, and they tend to keep features for a long time, whereas you can add new suffixes to things all the time and change it up. Common nouns and pronouns can go off on their own journeys, with one being ergative and the other one being not. That’s one way that the split can happen.
Gretchen: There’s also splits that are based on meaning, which I really find fascinating.
Lauren: I have one here in a language called “Dani” from Papua New Guinea, which is where you are more likely to get something marked as ergative if it’s an action that is uncommon.
Gretchen: So, if it’s describing something that’s unexpected, then it’s ergative. What would be an example of that?
Lauren: The example that I have from the class that I teach on syntax is that it would be uncommon if you had a sentence like, “The python ate the man,” but would be more common if you had a sentence like, “The man ate the python.” You wouldn’t mark that second one as ergative.
Gretchen: Okay. In this culture, it is common for humans to eat pythons but, mercifully, uncommon for pythons to eat humans.
Lauren: Yes.
Gretchen: I feel like I’ve learned some interesting things about Dani culture as well.
Lauren: I really like this one because what counts as uncommon surely varies quite a lot from culture to culture to linguistic context.
Gretchen: I feel like I’m remembering this saying about headlines where if a dog bites a man, that’s not a newspaper headline, but if a man bites a dog, that is a newspaper headline.
Lauren: And you should mark it ergative.
Gretchen: That’s interesting because, in this case, it’s the human biting the animal that’s less common. It’s not just a human/non-human animacy thing, it’s really a “In this culture, humans don’t bite dogs, but they do eat pythons.”
Lauren: Again, it’s the interesting case that gets this ergative marking added to it.
Gretchen: Because the ergative is like the “work-ative,” so it’s when you wanna call attention to something that’s doing a particular job.
Lauren: Another time you see a split across languages is depending on the tense of the verb. You’re more likely to get something that’s split in a way where the ergative is in the past and you have a non-ergative in present or future or however else the language segments up time. Nepali is a language that has ergative in the past.
Gretchen: What does that look like?
Lauren: Because it’s Nepali, I use it as a chance to use “momo” in my examples, which are a delicious dumpling.
Gretchen: Very delicious.
Lauren: If I say “Tomorrow, my sister will eat momos” –
Gretchen: Okay, that’s future.
Lauren: – I would say, “Bhōli didi mōmō khāncha.” “Didi” is “sister” – nothing marked there. But if I were to say, “Yesterday, my sister ate momos,” I would say, “Hijo didi-le momo khāyo.”
Gretchen: Ah, so instead of “didi,” which is just “sister” without a marking, you have “didi-le,” which is “sister” plus ergative. In both cases, “momo” is not marked. I assume maybe it’s that they’re in a certain word order that’s telling you that your sister ate momos, and also that momos are this delicious dumpling that are not animate and can’t go around eating your sister – one hopes.
Lauren: Yes, I guess if my sister was tragically eaten yesterday by a momo, I would still mark it as ergative, but only because it’s in the past and nothing to do with how unusual that situation is.
Gretchen: Okay. You would need to mark “momo” with an ergative because that sure is doing something but not actually because of the surprise factor.
Lauren: No. Because in the past with Nepali – and Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language, so it is part of this larger Indo-European family but on a completely different end of the geographic spectrum to English because it’s in Nepal.
Gretchen: Do we know why Nepali has an ergative even though most of the other Indo-European languages don’t?
Lauren: I don’t know what the exact mechanism is, but there are a whole bunch of features of Nepali that are very similar to languages from other families in the area, including the Tibeto-Burman languages that I work with. It’s possibly some kind of contact influence happening there.
Gretchen: That makes sense. So, we have ergative for nouns and pronouns. We have ergative for unusual events. We have ergative for past. Any more kinds of split ergative systems?
Lauren: Everything we’ve talked about so far is very much “If it’s this form, do this; if it’s this form, do that.” If it’s a pronoun, do this; or if it’s a past tense, do this. There’re ergative systems where it’s not a hard and fast rule of the grammar. It all depends on the context. These are called “optional systems.”
Gretchen: Ooo, this is so exciting.
Lauren: The languages that I work with have these optional systems. You can’t make a grammatical rule that’s like, “In the past, you must use ergative,” or “You must use ergative with pronouns.” Instead, what happens is if you look across a corpus, sometimes you’ll get ergative, sometimes you won’t, and it really depends on a range of different factors.
Gretchen: Do they have to do with trying to emphasise who’s doing the work?
Lauren: Yeah. They touch on some of the things we’ve talked about so far. You are more likely to get an ergative in the past because something has very clearly been done – the work, the active role, has been done. You’re much more likely to get it with something that was intentional or that is unusual. You also get things like you’re more likely to have ergative if it’s not a habitual action – if it’s a slightly unusual or uncommon action that someone’s performing – of if they’re more animate. You’re more likely to get ergative with a human than an animal and more likely with an animal than something like a tree.
Gretchen: Makes sense.
Lauren: But this is not 100% of the time. You need to collect a really large corpus of people talking about all kinds of different contexts to see where you’re more likely to get an ergative or not.
Gretchen: This also sounds like it has potential to be somewhat cultural because what people think of as a habitual action or what people usually do versus less commonly do seems like it would have some relationships with culture.
Lauren: This is also why it’s really important to not just give people a bunch of sentences to read and translate because if I give people a list of sentences to read and translate, they’ll just give the ergative in all the situations where you have someone acting on something else – so where you would expect there to be that index finger role acting on something else. But then you hear a story, and you’re like, “Where did that ergative go?” It’s because it’s being used optionally and strategically, which makes it very cool and fun to try and figure out the patterns.
Gretchen: When I nerd sniped you nine years ago into writing a blog post and updating the Wikipedia article about the ergative, I was really touching into something that was very near and dear to your heart.
Lauren: Indeed. Since then, I’ve also written the entire Yolmo language page in much more detail that also touches on a little bit of this ergative structuring.
Gretchen: Excellent. While we’re talking about ways that you could organise how you know who does what to who, you can group the person who’s by themself in a sentence with only one role with the one side of the verb with two or with the other side of the verb with two, but in principle, you don’t actually need to make it pattern with anything. You could have a system that has all three different roles marked in three different ways. Does that ever happen?
Lauren: It does, indeed. It’s known as a “tripartite” system because there are three parts, each doing their own thing.
Gretchen: Do you have an example of a language that does that?
Lauren: Conveniently, I have one from Wangkumara, which is a language of Queensland in Australia. They have three different pronouns depending on what role is in the sentence.
Gretchen: Oh, okay, very neat.
Lauren: For something like “I arrived,” our thumb form would be “nganyi.” For the “I” in “I visited you,” it would be “ngkatu.” In English, they’re just both “I,” but they’re both different. But then, if it was you visiting me, instead of “me,” it’s “nganha.” It’s three different pronouns for the three different roles.
Gretchen: “Nganyi,” “ngkatu,” “nganha” – three different forms. None of the fingers are touching each other. I think we could do this in pseudo-English if we wanted to. We would just have to invent an extra pronoun form.
Lauren: That makes sense.
Gretchen: We could have, like, “I visit them,” “They visit me,” but then “Mo arrives,” and “Tho arrives.”
Lauren: Excellent.
Gretchen: Those, you’d have like “I,” “me,” and “mo,” “they, “them,” and “tho,” or something like this. That would be your extra form all by itself doing its own thing in the sentence where it’s the only one.
Lauren: I love that if you hold up your thumb, index, and pinky and make sure none of them touch each other, you can make the “I love you” gesture that’s based on the ASL form of the verb “I love you.” It’s like, “I love you, tripartite systems.”
Gretchen: [Laughs] That is really great. I love the tripartite system so much I’m making the “I love you” handshape. While we’re on linguistic phenomena that are a little bit complicated but have really cool names –
Lauren: Okay, are we into the deepest ergative deep cut that we can make?
Gretchen: The deepest ergative deep cut has one of my favourite names of a grammatical phenomenon ever, and we have to talk about it because it just sounds so cool. In English, you can have a sentence like, “Gretchen visits Lauren,” which is the active sentence, and you can also have a version of that where you put more emphasis on the visitee by having “Lauren is visited by Gretchen.” That’s the passive version of the sentence.
Lauren: We’re moving fingers around on hands here.
Gretchen: We’re moving fingers around on hands here. You can promote that visitee person to a more prominent position for reasons of emphasis.
Lauren: Thankfully, the Lingthusiasm budget does not extend to hand surgery, so you’re just gonna have to imagine the fingers moving around.
Gretchen: This is gonna get a kinda gross, Halloween-y metaphor here. But in ergative languages, because the ways that the subject and object relate are different, instead of having a passive, we have an antipassive. I think there should be more specialised terminology that begins with “anti-” because I feel like it’s like having “antimatter” but for linguistics.
Lauren: See, I always think of antipasto share plates when I hear “antipassive.” They’re delicious, so I have positive feelings towards the antipassive.
Gretchen: The delicious platter with olives and artichokes and cured meats on it.
Lauren: I don’t wanna go straight from cured meats to fingers, but I can explain how the antipassive works if we like.
Gretchen: Okay, just give us the brief antipassive rundown while we’re here because I think it’s such a cool piece of terminology.
Lauren: I’ll do a translated example from Dyirbal, which is a language spoken in Queensland in Australia – because this is the first language the antipassive was described for, so it shows up in a lot of examples. If a man was cutting the tree, we have “man” and “tree,” and it’s an ergative sentence, so the index finger “man” is marked “ergative.” It’s distinct and different.
Gretchen: Gotcha.
Lauren: In the same way with the passive you get rid of focusing on one of the fingers in the sentence, we can get rid of the tree and just have “The man was cutting,” but in Dyirbal, you can’t have “the man” still be ergative because now there’s only one thing that’s in the sentence, and so you have to make “the man” – even though he’s still cutting, and we think of “cutting” as having two things – we now make it look like the non-ergative, so that absolutive, so it looks like a thumb and is, therefore, more focused.
Gretchen: In the same way that in a non-ergative language, like English, you can have “Gretchen visits Lauren,” or “I visit them,” you can change that into the passive by going, “Lauren is visited” – there you are all by yourself in the sentence – or “They are visited” – there you are all by yourself in a sentence. In this case, “The man was cutting the tree,” instead of promoting the tree and going, “The tree was being cut,” which you’d maybe do if it was a passive, you have “The man was cutting,” but now, you have to take the ergative off “the man” because otherwise he has previously being marked with ergative.
Lauren: Yes. In a language like Dyirbal, it’s completely normal-sounding in a way that a passive sounds normal in English even though you’ve gotten rid of one of the roles because you’ve changed the marking. It makes complete sense. It sounds very grammatical. And it just makes “the man” even more of a focus, and what is being cut is less of a focus. In the way that a passive gets rid of the original subject, the antipassive makes the original subject, like, subject++. That’s why it’s “anti-passive.”
Gretchen: If you put a passive and an antipassive in the same sentence, would it cause an explosion? We’ve talked about all of these interesting – ergativity can pop up in various little bits of the grammar in different languages. But what if I were to tell you that there’s actually a little teeny tiny bit of English that is actually ergative?
Lauren: It was here all along.
Gretchen: The ergativity was inside the house all along!
Lauren: Please share.
Gretchen: You know how in English we have a double E ending that goes on certain nouns. You can have things like “retiree” or “escapee” or “employee.”
Lauren: We’ve had “devotee” and “arrivee” in this episode so far.
Gretchen: That’s true. This is a thing that goes on nouns, but they’re all nouns that come from a verb. If you have a verb like “employ,” and you say, “Gretchen employs Lauren,” then “Lauren” is the employee.
Lauren: Employee of the Month I would hope.
Gretchen: I don’t actually employ you, but you are the Employee of the Month in my heart.
Lauren: Aww, thanks.
Gretchen: The same thing is if I visit you, you’re the visitee; if I pay you, you’re the payee; if I nominate you; you’re the nominee, and so on.
Lauren: So, there’re two roles in this sentence.
Gretchen: Right. The one that is acted upon is the one that when you make it into a noun with “-ee,” that’s what it means. But there’s another set of verbs that you can also use “-ee” with. If we decide that we want to retire from making Lingthusiasm, which we have no intention to do, but we would then be “retirees.” We’re the only entity in this action, you know, “Gretchen is a retiree,” “Lauren is a retiree,” “I have retired,” “You have retired.” I’m not retiring you.
Lauren: So, there’s only one role. I’ve got my thumb, and that’s marked with this “-ee.”
Gretchen: Yeah. If you were trying to escape, you could be an “escapee.” It’s not like I escape you. It’s just, “You escape.” Now, you’re an “escapee.” Again, here’s this thumb and here’s this pinky that can both get the “-ee” marking on them.
Lauren: Wait a second, that’s my ergative handshape, Gretchen.
Gretchen: That’s my ergative handshape – that “employee” and “retiree” and “escapee” and “visitee,” “arrivee” all get the “-ee” marking on them, and the one that’s left over that’s the exception is things like “employer” and “visitor” and “nominator” – these ones that do the action, that are the ergative one that’re doing the work – all the work of nominating you – that’s the one that has the “-or” ending, which is the ergative one.
Lauren: There we go! There was a tiny bit of ergativity in English all along.
Gretchen: We should note that not all words that end in “-ee” are examples of this particular phenomenon in English. You have “mentor” and “mentee,” but you don’t have, for example, “chimpanzor” and “chimpanzee.”
Lauren: [Laughs]
Gretchen: “Chickador” and “chickadee.”
Lauren: Okay, that is definitely looking for morphology that is not there.
Gretchen: “Frisbor” and “frisbee” – c’mon!
Lauren: The “frisbor” is the person that throws the frisbee.
Gretchen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then the “frisbee” is the one that receives it.
Lauren: Right, okay, that is definitely some interesting morphological reanalysis there.
Gretchen: [Laughs] I think it works great. But it doesn’t happen for every instance of the “-ee” ending, but it does happen in a bunch of them. So, here’s this example of a tiny, tiny way in which English has a split ergative system.
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Hi! Could you explain me how ergative/absolutive languages deal with passive voice?
Sure thing: They don’t. Generally they have what’s known as an antipassive (i.e. the deletion of the absolutive argument in a transitive verb and the promotion of the ergative argument to the absolutive position resulting in a new intransitive verb). The reason is you don’t really need a passive. If anything, you can remove the ergative argument from any transitive verb and get a passive. Plus, mostly the reason we need passives is in coordination. So that rather than saying this:
Mary walked into a room and someone greeted her.
You can say this:
Mary walked into the room and was greeted.
Shorter and simpler. The reason this works is because the subject of “was greeted” is the same as the subject of “walked”. Notice what happens with an ergative system:
Mary walked into the room and got-greeted (by-someone).
The absolutive arguments of “walked” and “got-greeted” already match, so you don’t need a passive (and, indeed, you can leave off the ergative argument). This one, though, won’t work:
Mary walked into the room and someone got-greeted by-Mary.
Above, Mary is the absolutive argument of “walk”, but the ergative argument of “got-greeted”. That won’t work. Thus you have to antipassivize “got-greeted” to produce:
Mary walked into the room and greeted (to-someone).
Now the arguments match and you can introduce an optional object if you want.
This isn’t the best explanation. If you want a better explanation, see the long write-up I did on ergative alignment many years ago here. It explains everything.
Not too long ago, we talked about certain verbs in English that are sometimes transitive and sometimes not. We used “eat” as an example, where we can either follow it with something that got eaten, or with nothing at all.
(1) Steven ate a sandwich.
(2) Steven ate.
You could try saying there are two different versions of eat — one which needed an object and another which didn’t. But instead, we suggested that the argument was still there, but that it’s left unpronounced. And we hinted at the possibility that it might be something like the null pronoun PRO, which we explored in Episode 52.
But, there is another possibility. In English, and in many other languages, there is an operation than can change the number of arguments that a verb needs to form a complete sentence: passivization. Over at our website, we even talked a little bit about what that looked like:
(3) “The player took many paths” becomes “there were many paths taken (by the player)”
As you can see, a passive verb kind of knocks the subject off of its pedestal and makes it optional (in the form of what’s called a prepositional by-phrase). The former object of the verb gets ‘promoted’ to subject position, since clauses in English always need a subject of some kind.
Now, passivization always targets the subject of a sentence, so that doesn’t really help us with verbs like “eat” or “read”. So why bring this up? Well, there’s a related process in some other languages: antipassivization. In languages with antipassive verbs, it’s the object that gets ‘demoted’ to an optional position of some kind (or, sometimes, kicked out of the sentence altogether). Take a look at a couple of example sentences in Chukchi, an indigenous language of Siberia; the original sentences are at the top, the morpheme-by-morpheme translation is right below it, and there’s an English interpretation at the very bottom.
(4) Chukchi (Kozinsky et al. 1988: 652)
a. ʔaaček-a kimitʔ-ən ne-nlʔetet-ən
youth-ERG load-ABS 3PL.SUBJ-carry-AOR.3SG.OBJ
‘The young men carried away the/a load.’ (transitive)
b. ʔaaček-ət ine-nlʔetet-gʔe-t kimitʔ-e
youth-ABS ANTIP-carry-AOR.3SG.SUBJ-PL load-INSTR
‘The young men carried away the/a load.’ (antipassive)
What’s important above is that that basic word order of the language involves putting the subject (ʔaaček-a) first, the object (kimitʔ-ən) second, and the transitive verb (ne-nlʔetet-ən) last. When the verb is in its antipassive form, which we can see happened because of the prefix ine-, the object moves over to the end of the sentence and turns into more of a prepositional phrase, similar to what happens to subjects in English passive sentences. The meaning is still there, but the expression is different.
We could speculate, then, that there is actually some antipassivization in English. Of course, it’s limited to certain verbs, since others most definitely can’t be used grammatically without their objects:
(5) *Rebecca destroyed.
But, then, passivization is limited to specific verbs, too:
(6) Steven fell down a flight of stairs.
(7) *A flight of stairs was fallen down by Steven.
So, maybe it’s just another idiosyncrasy of language. Or maybe there’s a deeper reason that’s a bit hard to see. Can you think of any other reasons why some verbs require the presence of their objects, while with others it’s only optional? This is one linguists are still working on solving. It’s definitely a puzzle to ponder!
It’s been almost ten months since I started my conlang and finally I have gotten around to fully describe the voices. I still have a long way to go, but having fleshed this out is a major step forward. It’s particularly interesting, but anyway, here go some examples for every possible voice:
For type I verbs, which need an obert nominative argument and an ergative argument (that can be omitted):
1. Active voice:
taxil paŋu ppisu
kid-ERG hit dog-NOM
A kid is hitting a dog
2. Antipassive voice:
taxi paŋuru (ppisumi)
kid-NOM hit-ANTIP (dog-OBL)
A kid is hitting (a dog)
3. Reflexive voice:
taxi paŋuxiru
kid-NOM hit-RFL-INTR
A kid is hitting himself
4. Applicative voice (benefactive, malefactive and dative):
taxil paŋuxi (ppisumi) kaxi
kid-ERG hit-APL (dog-OBL) 2SG.NOM
A kid is hitting (a dog) for you
taxil paŋuaxa (ppisumi) kaxi
kid-ERG hit-CAUS (dog-OBL) 2SG.NOM
A kid makes you hit (a dog)
And for type II verbs, which don’t admit ergative arguments and always receive the intransitive marker -ru (notice how the antipassive and reflexive in 2 and 3 get this ending too). There are two sets of examples, with an expletive (since a nominative element is mandatory) and with a true proun (that works like a noun):
6. Active voice:
ar luyyaru
EXPL.NOM rain-INTR
It's raining
hura luyyaru
1SG.NOM rain-INTR
It's raining on me
7. Applicative voice:
luyyaxi (*ar-OBL) kixil
rain-APL (EXPL-OBL) water-NOM
It's raining water
luyyaxi (humi) kixil
rain-APL (1SG.OBL) water-NOM
It's raining water (on me)
8. Causative voice:
taxil luyyaaxa ar
kid-ERG rain-CAUS EXPL.NOM
A kid makes it rain
taxil luyyaaxa hura
kid-ERG rain-CAUS 1SG.NOM
a kid makes it rain on me
-- The dummy pronoun ar cannot appear in (2 iv) beacause it only has nominative form.
-- The expected causatives in (2 v) would involve an oblique argument and a nominative expletive. However, since expletives only show nominative inflection, they can’t appear as an oblique argument, making
*taxil luyyaaxa ar-obl ar
impossible. Furthermore, since the expletive pronoun is semantically null, the oblique object can take over its place, thus transforming the expected
*taxil luyyaaxa humi ar
into
taxil luyaaxa hura.
