The acquisition of ergativity ed. by Edith Bavin, Sabine Stoll (review)

This book is an important contribution to language documentation and to the understanding of child language acquisition. With the exception of one paper on Hindi, small languages are the focus: Kurmanji Kurdish, Basque, Arctic Quebec Inuktitut, three Papuan languages (Kaluli, Ku Waru, and Duna), six Mayan languages (K’iche’, Yukatek/Yucatec, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Mam, Q’anjob’al), one Australian language (Warlpiri), and one Tibeto-Burman language (Chintang). The numbers of speakers range from 15 million (Kurmanji Kurdish upper limit) to 2,000 (Kaluli).

The papers differ as to research questions, but with valuable overlap. Apart from the introduction and an initial paper on ergativity by Bernard Comrie, the papers follow a similar structure: the authors outline the grammatical systems of which ergativity is a part and discuss speech settings (language ecology, languages of education, and literacy) and data-collection methods. Then they present data relating to how (and whether) children acquire the ways of representing ergativity, and sometimes data regarding caregiver input. Most papers draw on small data sets, so authors are cautious in interpreting findings (e.g. the chapters by Jennifer Austin and by Bhuvana Narasimhan). Three papers compare acquisition of ergativity across three or four languages within a family or phylum (Mayan languages: Penelope Brown, Barbara Pfeiler, Lourdes de León, and Clifton Pye; Clifton Pye, Barbara Pfeiler, and Pedro Mateo Pedro; Papuan languages: Alan Rumsey, Lila San Roque, and Bambi Schieffelin).

Ergative marking relates to basic properties of sentence grammar: how speakers express who is doing what to whom, and how this relates to argument structures of predicates. The subject of an intransitive verb (S) and the object of a transitive verb (O) are aligned with absolutive marking, while the subject of a transitive verb (A) has ergative marking. Morphologically, this is expressed in three main ways: case marking on the participants (Warlpiri, Hindi, Kaluli, Ku Waru, and Duna), agreement with the participants on the main predicate (or an auxiliary) (Mayan languages), or using both case marking and predicate agreement (Basque, Chintang, Kurmanji Kurdish, Inuktitut).

Most authors provide some age-related data on how and when children acquire the ways of representing A, S, and O. By age two, Mayan children have mastered basic agreement; by age 2;1, a Hindi child provides ergative marking in the right contexts; and by age three, children are doing this for Warlpiri and the Papua New Guinea languages. But Chintang children show considerable variation in how they learn the ergative case. Comparisons are not easy because authors do not give comparable definitions of mastery.

Does the form of the ergative marking affect how children acquire it? Basque has ergative case and ergative agreement. Children do not produce them in tandem; some children omitted ergative case marking while producing ergative agreement, and others on occasion omitted ergative agreement. In some Mayan languages (Brown et al.), children developed absolutive subject and object agreement before ergative agreement.

Canonical ergative marking has a participant-level property and a proposition-level property: it marks off the most active participant (‘agent’) in a proposition with at least two participants. Languages vary as to the weight placed on these properties. If the participant-level property has less weight, then the subject of any transitive verb (A) has ergative case, regardless of how agentive. If agentivity matters, then, as in Warlpiri, the subjects of some two-argument verbs (e.g. verbs of speaking) have absolutive case. If the proposition-level property has weight, then no intransitive verb has an ergative subject. If it has less weight, then a subject may have ergative case, regardless of whether an object is present or implicit.

This leads to questions about how children understand the association of ergative with A. In Warlpiri undergeneralization of ergative to prototypically agentive A was not seen. Failure to...