Ergativity: The Secret of Languages without Subjects

by Hélène Gérardin

Who doesn’t recall their first grammar lessons and the enchantment of the terms – “subject”, “object”, “verb” – heard the earliest classes, never to escape the ears of language and grammar enthusiasts? What if, despite their ubiquity, these terms weren’t truly universal? What if some languages didn’t allow the subject to be defined as easily as our grammar classes seem to imply? At the heart of this question lies the mystery of ergativity.

To understand the scope of the issue, we need to think back to the first English grammar lessons we had at school. There we are instilled with an indisputable truth that “the subject is the element of the sentence which carries out the action” and that “the object is the element which undergoes it”. These certainties continue to guide us as we explore the corollaries of these definitions: “the verb agrees with its subject and not with its object”. Subsequently, when later studying languages with declension, we persist in the same direction: “the subject is marked in the nominative case and the object in the accusative case”.

There are numerous examples illustrating this framework:

(1)

(2)

However, this framework and these definitions are not universally applicable; they merely reflect what is known as an “accusative” system. Many languages operate under different systems; these are called ergative languages, and they are characterised by an “ergative” system. Ergativity manifests across diverse language families and regions, including Basque, Caucasian languages, Mayan languages, numerous Amerindian, Australian, Siberian, and Indo-Aryan languages, to name a few.

In ergative languages, there is no single category termed “subject”, and this affects the distribution of cases. What makes ergative languages different from accusative languages is the fact that the former establish a fundamental dichotomy between intransitive verbs (which do not take a direct object, as in (1)) and transitive verbs (which take a direct object, as in (2)). Consequently, the nominative case is used to denote what in English corresponds to the subject for intransitive verbs and the object for transitive verbs. Conversely, another case (commonly referred to as ergative) is used to mark the subject of transitive verbs. As for the verb, it aligns with the element marked in the nominative case, regardless of its function (as either subject or object).

Laz, a South Caucasian language, illustrates an ergative system through the two example sentences cited above:

(3) ‘The man arrives.’

(4) ‘The man builds a house.’

Some languages exhibit the coexistence of both systems. For instance, Svan, another South Caucasian language, features an accusative system in the present and an ergative system in the past.

Present :

(5) ‘The man arrives.’

(6) ‘The man builds a house.’

Passé :

(7) ‘The man arrived.’

(8) ‘The man built a house.’

This is the secret of ergativity, a phenomenon – and here lies another yet unexplored mystery – that spans the entire globe, with a particular fondness for mountainous regions. The Caucasus stands as a prime illustration.

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