Ergativity in Nakh–Daghestanian

AbstractThis chapter presents an analysis of ergativity and more general alignment in the Nakh-Daghestanian (or East Caucasian) language family. The surveyed constructions are gender and person agreement on verbs, case marking, valency changing operations, imperatives, reflexive and reciprocal constructions, conjunction reduction, complement control and the lexicon. In accordance with previous studies on this topic, I show that the evidence for ergativity is mainly to be found in the morphology. The syntactic alignment shows tendencies towards accusativity or neutral, but clearly no indications for ergative subjects. This is in line with researchers such as Kibrik who describes Nakh-Daghestanian languages as dominated by (semantic) roles.