An ergative-absolutive language (or just ergative language) is one that marks the subject of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs.

If the language has morphological case, then the verb arguments are marked thus:

• The subject of a transitive verb is marked with a case conventionally known as "ergative".
• The subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are both marked with a case called "absolutive".

If there's no case marking, the language can resort to word order (for example, the absolutive argument comes before the verb and the ergative argument comes after it). For instance, Abkhaz has no morphological ergative case, but its verbal agreement structure is ergative.

The term ergative-absolutive language is considered by some unsatisfactory, since there are very few languages without any patterns that exhibit nominative-accusative alignment. Instead, they posit, that one should only speak of ergative-absolutive systems, which languages employ to different degrees.

See morphosyntactic alignment for a more technical explanation and a comparison with nominative-accusative languages.

Examples

The only ergative-absolutive language in Europe is the language isolate Basque. Note the following examples:

Gizona etorri da. "The man has arrived."

Gizonak mutila ikusi du. "The man saw the boy."

In Basque, gizon is "man", mutil is "boy", and a suffixed -a shows the definite form ("the"). You will notice that gizon is different depending on whether it is the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb. The first form is in the absolutive case (marked by a null morpheme) and the second form is in the ergative case (marked by a suffixed -k).

Other languages that employ an ergative-absolutive system are:

• Dyirbal and several other Australian Aboriginal languages, which are famous in the linguistic literature for their ergative patterns
• Pashto and Hindi, which belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages
• Sāmoan and many other Austronesian languages
• Virtually all Caucasian languages (Abkhaz, Chechen, etc.)
• The various Inuit dialects (Inuktitut, Inupik, Yupik)
• Many languages of the Americas, such as Maya and Navajo

Split ergativity

Many languages classified as ergative in fact show split ergativity, whereby syntactic and/or morphological ergative pattern are conditioned by some part of the grammatical context (typically the persons of the verb arguments, or the tense/aspect of the verb). Hindi has an ergative construction in the past tense but accusative in the present. Dyirbal pronouns are morphologically nominative-accusative when the subject is first or second person, but ergative when the subject is a third person.

Traces of ergativity in English

English does show a trace of something that could be regarded as ergativity. With an intransitive verb, adding the suffix -ee to the verb produces a label for the person performing the action:

"John has retired." → "John is a retiree."

"John has escaped." → "John is an escapee."

"John is standing." → "John is a standee."

However, with a transitive verb, adding -ee does not produce a label for the person doing the action. Instead, it gives us a label for the person to whom the action is done:

"Mike employs Susie." → "Susie is an employee."

"Mike has inducted Susie." → "Susie is an inductee."

"Mike has appointed Susie" → "Susie is an appointee."

The differing effect of the "-ee" suffix, depending on the transitivity of the verb, can be considered ergativity. (Etymologically, the sense in which "-ee" denotes the object of a transitive verb is the original one, arising from French past participles in "-é". This would still be considered the prevalent sense in UK English: the intransitive uses are all 19th century American coinages and all except "escapee" are still marked as "chiefly U.S." by the Oxford English Dictionary.)

See also

• Ergative verb
• Split ergativity