Ergativity in the Caucasus

AbstractThis chapter provides an overview of ergativity-related phenomena in the languages of the Caucasus, a geographical region with a high concentration of ergative languages. The chapter reviews the morphologically ergative nature of the languages, revealed in case marking and gender agreement in Nakh-Daghestanian as well as person marking in Northwest Caucasian. No manifestation of syntactic ergativity is observed in languages of the Caucasus, with the exception of relativization in Circassian. It also reviews ergative splits observed in the Caucasus and describes attested patterns of split subject case marking in intransitive clauses. Finally, various properties usually thought to attest to the inherent or structural nature of ergative arguments are discussed: theta-relatedness, behavior in subject-to-subject raising, ability to participate in hierarchical agreement, the DP versus PP distinction, the structural locus of ergative case assignment, and some problems for configurational approaches to case assignment.