According to a hypothesis proposed in On the Nature of Grammatical Relations by Alec Marantz, this concept is found in the D-structure level in Government and Binding Theory.
According to a hypothesis proposed in On the Nature of Grammatical Relations by Alec Marantz, this concept is found in the D-structure level in Government and Binding Theory. Based in large part on the work done by Uhlenbeck, this concept has been theorized to have originally been the basis for Proto-Indo-European, based on the suppletion in certain pronouns and based on a discrepancy between animate and inanimate nouns. Several Australian languages show a split, using this system for nouns, but a competing one for pronouns. In English, this property is found in a certain class of verbs concerned with statal changes, such as the verb "break", in which the agency of the subject, or lack thereof, reflects the transitivity of the verb. Most famously found in the Caucasian languages and Basque, this is, for 10 points, what syntactic system, which identifies the subject of an intransitive verb with the object of a transitive verb, a system in opposition to Nominative-Accusative languages?
According to a hypothesis proposed in On the Nature of Grammatical Relations by Alec Marantz, this concept is found in the D-structure level in Government and Binding Theory.
{Ergativity} [or {Ergative}-{Absolutive} or {Ergative}-{Nominative}]