Syntactic ergativity and the theory of subjecthood: Evidence from anaphor binding in West Circassian
Ksenia Ershova
October 2022
 

This paper examines the role of subjecthood in the domain of anaphoric binding through the lens of West Circassian, a Northwest Caucasian language with ergative alignment. West Circassian reflexives and reciprocals display a puzzling mismatch in binding directionality with transitive ergative-absolutive predicates. Reflexives treat the ergative agent as the structurally higher argument, with the bound pronoun appearing in the position of the absolutive theme. A reciprocal pronoun, on the other hand, appears in the ergative position and is bound by the absolutive theme, suggesting that the absolutive theme is structurally superior to the ergative agent. The paper demonstrates that both anaphors are constrained in cross-linguistically familiar ways, but reflexives are subject to an additional licensing condition which limits the set of possible antecedents to the highest argument in the thematic domain. By demonstrating that structural superiority is domain-sensitive the paper challenges the significance of subjecthood as a grammatical primitive and argues that it should be replaced with a tree-geometrical notion of contextually determined prominence.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005168
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Language 99(2), 193-241
keywords: ergativity, subject, subjecthood, reflexive, reciprocal, binding, west circassian, adyghe, northwest caucasian, morphology, syntax
previous versions: v4 [October 2022]
v3 [August 2022]
v2 [July 2021]
v1 [April 2020]
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