earticle

영어

This article explores the exact meaning of "ergative" which has been used differently by many linguists. As the purpose of Chomskyan generative-grammar and the recent minimalist program is to develop the Universal Grammar for all types of languages in the world, it is very essential to define the exact meaning of "ergative". Moreover, as there exist the mixed systems of Erg/Abs and Nom/Acc such as Kartvelian and Dyirbal, it is more important to make the meaning of the ergative clear. In this article we propose that the Exceptional Case Marking constructions and the "force-type verbs" constructions in English show the syntactic ergativity. These sentences have ergative syntax working in terms of an S/O pivot. For these sentences two clauses may only be joined in a coordinate structure if they share an NP which is in S or O function in each clause. In discussing the ergativity, we could define English as having syntactic ergativity. Some may assert that English does not have ergativity. But it could be too rash to conclude that English has no ergativity. We only need some more time to find out new English syntactic ergative constructions which have been unknown to us.