Typology of ergativity and grammatical asymmetries in Daghestanian

Abstract

The paper proposes a parametric analysis of grammatical asymmetries in Daghestanian languages. In this linguistic family, morphological ergativity is accompanied by non-consistent grammatical asymmentries exhibited by various syntactic operations. I demonstrate that this inconsistency can be accounted for under assumption that the internal structure of case-marked argumental nominals and hierarchical c-command relations are the two major parameters determining the applicability of grammatical operations.

Keywords

• ergativity
• grammatical asymmetries
• linguistic typology
• daghestanian languages