Working Papers in Linguistics - 2016

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Are Philippine Languages Ergative? Evidence from Western Subanon.

(University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Department of Linguistics, 2016-08-01) O’Brien, Colleen

The issue of Philippine voice systems and morphosyntactic alignment is a controversial one and has implications not just for typological descriptions of languages but also for the theories of grammatical relations and voice. I argue that the ergative analysis does not provide an optimal description of grammatical relations in Western Subanon, a less studied Philippine language. By looking at Subanon, I hope to add to the wider debate of Philippine voice.
Case-marking of Core Arguments and Syntactic Alignment in Old Japanese

(University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Department of Linguistics, 2016-05-01) Iannucci, David J.

Abstract In recent years, a theory has gained currency according to which Old Japanese, the oldest attested an.cestor of the modern Japanese language, exhibited a split system of syntactic alignment: active-stative in nominalized clauses (most of them subordinate), and nominative-accusative (the default) elsewhere. I attempt to show that the evidence and arguments offered in support of this theory are entirely insufﬁcient to establish its authenticity.1