Grammatical Relations and Syntactic Ergativity in Roviana: A little-described language of Solomon Islands

Abstract

This dissertation describes the system of grammatical relations and syntactic ergativity in Roviana. Roviana is a little-described language of the Solomon Islands. Roviana is an ergative language and it codes morphological ergativity through the lack of an article before the transitive subject and overt marking of objects and intransitive subjects. Roviana indexes the object on the verb but does not index subjects. Roviana displays a unique pattern of syntactic ergativity in that the ergative argument has access to some operations that the absolutive arguments do not have access to. This description is of value to Roviana community members and language science.