The overarching theme of this volume is the formal expression of the range and limits of ergativity. The book contains cutting-edge theoretical papers by top authors in the field, who also conduct original field work and bring new data to light. It contains articles that apply the most recent theoretical tools to the area of ergativity, and then explore the issues that emerge. Languages investigated in the text include Basque, Georgian, and Hindi.

This volume presents a collection of papers on the enticing and complex theme of Ergativity. The papers exemplify theoretical depth applied to a wide range of languages, with the majority of papers based on original fieldwork. Ergativity refers to a grammatical pattern in which the logical subject of intransitive clauses and the logical object of transitive clauses share some grammatical features, and in this respect differ from transitive subjects. The shared features are often case and/or agreement, but a variety of other relevant features have also been isolated in the literature. The...

This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages. In English, count nouns are those that can be counted and pluralized (two cats), whereas mass nouns cannot be, at least not without a change in meaning (#two rices). The chapters in this volume explore the question of the cognitive and linguistic universality and variability of the concepts count and mass from philosophical, semantic, and morpho-syntactic points of...

This volume explores the expression of the concepts count and mass in human language and probes the complex relation between seemingly incontrovertible aspects of meaning and their varied grammatical realizations across languages. In English, count nouns are those that can be counted and pluralized (two cats), whereas mass nouns cannot be, at least not without a change in meaning (#two rices). The chapters in this volume explore the question of the cognitive and linguistic universality and variability of the concepts count and mass from philosophical, semantic, and morpho-syntactic points of...

This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one...