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Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan

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An Erratum to this article was published on 26 November 2014

Abstract

Researchers using different methods have converged on the result that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Cross-linguistic evidence for the subject processing advantage (SPA) has come mostly from accusative languages, where the covariance of grammatical function and case prevents researchers from determining which of these two factors underlies the SPA. Languages with morphological ergativity allow for the separation of case and grammatical function, since the subject position is associated with two cases: absolutive (intransitive subjects) and ergative (transitive subjects). Prior experimental results on the processing of ergative languages suggest that grammatical function and surface case may be equally important in relative clause processing. On the one hand, as a syntactic subject, the ergative DP has a processing advantage over the absolutive object. On the other hand, the appearance of an ergative serves as a cue for the projection of the absolutive object, which gives processing preference to that object. This paper further tests these findings by examining the processing of relative clauses in Ch’ol and Q’anjob’al, two languages that mark ergativity via agreement on the predicate (head-marking). We address two main questions: (a) does the SPA hold in ergative languages? And (b) are case and agreement equally able to license grammatical functions, and if so, is this reflected in processing? With regard to (a), our results support the SPA, suggesting that it is present in both ergative and accusative languages. With respect to (b), we do not find evidence for a cueing effect associated with the ergative agreement marker. We conclude that dependent-marking is superior to head-marking in tracking grammatical function; in the absence of case cues, universal structural preferences such as the SPA become more pronounced. We also consider and reject a processing explanation for syntactic ergativity, according to which some languages categorically avoid A-bar movement of the ergative with a gap because it imposes a heavy processing load. Our results show that the processing of ergative gaps is not associated with greater cost than the processing of absolutive object gaps; this suggests that an explanation for syntactic ergativity should be sought outside processing.

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Notes

  1. As has been frequently noted, it is often inaccurate to characterize an entire language as “ergative” or “accusative”, since most, if not all, languages exhibit some reflexes of more than one alignment type (e.g., Dixon 1979). Neutral alignments (in which all core arguments are marked alike) or tripartite alignments (in which each core argument is marked distinctly) are also attested and not discussed here.

  2. Though A-bar extraction restrictions are the prototypical instance of syntactic ergativity, some researchers (in particular, Kazenin 1994 and Manning 1996) use the label “syntactic ergativity” to refer to a wider range of syntactic phenomena which distinguish ergative from absolutive arguments. In this paper we use the term to refer specifically to asymmetries in A-bar extraction.

  3. Other work on processing in ergative languages include Nevins et al. (2007), Erdocia et al. (2009), Choudhary et al. (2009), Díaz et al. (2011), and Zawiszewski et al. (2011).

  4. Avar does not have overt determiners, so in the translations below we provide both definite and indefinite interpretations.

  5. Note that both the intransitive and the transitive stimuli contained two arguments. In the case of the intransitives, the arguments were absolutive and oblique.

  6. Basque also has post-nominal relative clauses with a relativizer (Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina 2003:765ff.; Rebuschi 2009), but these are limited to a particular register and are beyond the scope of our discussion.

  7. Outside Basque, there is preliminary evidence that transitivity differences may play a role in processing, as such differences require the parser to manipulate fewer or more arguments associated with each predicate: see Shapiro et al. (1987), Chen et al. (2005) for English, Jurka (2010) for German, Polinsky et al. (2013) for English and Russian.

  8. The ergative data are reported in Austin (2007); the statistics on the absolutive are courtesy of Jennifer Austin (p.c.).

  9. A sentence completion task may be a good way of further testing the proposal made here: subjects see the form ending in -ak and compete the sentence in such a way that this form is interpreted as ergative or absolutive. Such a test would provide an independent measure of the comprehension bias that we have discussed.

  10. Some researchers suggest that the indexing of the ergative in Basque is cliticization, not agreement (Nevins and Arregi 2012; Preminger 2009, 2012). If so, Basque becomes even more similar to Avar in terms of case marking and agreement. For us, nothing hinges on the status of ergative marking on Basque verbs.

  11. Ас-Салам (As-Salam). (n.d.) in Википедия (Wikipedia); retrieved June 25, 2012, from http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ас-Салам.

  12. Self-paced reading studies of Russian include Levy et al. (2013) and Polinsky and Potsdam (2014). For an auditory study of the processing of Russian relativization, see Polinsky (2011).

  13. We do not have corpus data on pro-drop for Chol or Q’anjob’al, but in a related language, Sacapultec, the ergative DP is pro-dropped 86.7 %, the absolutive subject, 47.3 %, and the absolutive object, 53.1 % (DuBois 1987:822).

  14. Stative or “non-verbal” predicates systematically lack aspect marking and show other differences, not discussed here (see Coon 2013 for discussion).

  15. Q’anjob’al has verb-stem-final status suffixes, as in Ch’ol, but they are generally deleted when not phrase-final. While Ch’ol has a single determiner jiñi, Q’anjob’al has a series of noun classifier markers, such as ix, which is used for female humans. We gloss them all as “det” for simplicity.

  16. For a discussion of the cross-linguistic tendency to express the progressive aspect with biclausal constructions see Bybee et al. (1994), Laka (2006), and Coon (2013).

  17. In other work (e.g., Mateo Pedro 2009; Coon et al. in press), the ergative is analyzed as the possessive marker, and the corresponding embedded clauses are argued to be nominalizations. In Q’anjob’al, even embedded intransitive subjects are marked with the ergative prefix, supporting the idea that these are, formally, possessed nominalizations.

  18. For stimuli and images, see Polinsky Lab Dataverse: http://dvn-4.hmdc.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/polinsky.

  19. Throughout this discussion, we report fixed effect coefficients, β, from mixed-effects regression, which include subjects and items as random effects. We used logistic regression in the case of choice data and linear regression in the case of response time data. Our data and analysis scripts are available in the supplementary materials at the Polinsky Lab Dataverse: http://dvn-4.hmdc.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/polinsky.

  20. In this analysis, we transformed the RTs by the natural log. In doing so, we ensured that the residuals were normally distributed. We thus minimized the impact of potential outlier observations. We compared this transformation to an inverse transformation, and found that only the log transformation led to normal residuals (see Ratcliff 1993; Baayen and Milin 2010). In all analyses, the pattern of results and significance were the same.

  21. There are no frequency data for Ch’ol, so this is just a conjecture on our part, although it is supported by native speakers’ intuitions.

  22. Accuracy on unambiguous object extractions was low (51 %), therefore we do not use it as a reasonable basis on which to identify outlier participants (as we did for the Ch’ol data, by including it in a d-prime calculation). Instead, we examined each participant’s average percentage score on unambiguous subject extractions (both transitive and intransitive), and excluded those whose average, expressed as a z-score, was less than twice the standard deviation below the mean (0.99 [==83 %], s.d.: 0.30). There were two participants excluded by this criterion.

  23. The accuracy for unambiguous subject extractions is so low that it suggests that participants may have been performing at chance. Given the high standard error on these trials and the slightly higher than 50 % success rate, though, we treat this result as a low score with great noise instead.

  24. Basque also has postnominal relatives (see footnote 6), which reveal subject preference (Carreiras et al. 2010); however, postnominal RCs do not present an ambiguity of the type discussed in Sect. 2, so the comparison with prenominal RCs is more difficult.

  25. See Sect. 5 for a discussion of Agent Focus (AF) in Mayan.

  26. Similar patterns, where subjects with higher levels of formal education produce cleaner data in an experimental setting, have been reported for English as well (cf. Dąbrowska and Street 2006), so one does not need to travel to Dagestan or Guatemala to observe noisy data.

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Acknowledgements

The authors of this paper are listed in alphabetical order. The work reported here was supported in part by the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Harvard), the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (Harvard), the National Heritage Language Research Center (UCLA), the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland Grant Z903702, the National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1144223 to Maria Polinsky, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship 2012136967 to Adam M. Morgan. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the United States Government, or the other agencies.

We would like to thank Judith Aissen, Caitlin Keenan, Janet Fodor, Annie Gagliardi, Itziar Laka, Beth Levin, Omer Preminger, Gregory Scontras, audiences at the 86th annual meeting of the LSA and WCCFL 31, three anonymous reviewers, and our editor Marcel den Dikken for helpful comments on this paper. Nicolás Arcos López, Olga Fedorova, Emily Raykhman, and Svetlana Tchistiakova deserve thanks for their help with technical aspects of this project. Finally, we are grateful to the following individuals and groups in Chiapas, Mexico and Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, Guatemala for their time, logistical support and hospitality: Diego Adalberto, Daniel Pedro Mateo, María Pedro, Pedro Gutiérrez Sánchez, the family of Nicolás Arcos López, Universidad Intercultural de Tabasco students and staff, Asociación de Mujeres Eulalenses para el Desarrollo Integral Pixan Konob’, the Municipality of Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango, and the participants in our experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Lauren Eby Clemens, Pedro Mateo Pedro, Maria Polinsky & Gabrielle Tandet

  2. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Jessica Coon

  3. University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Adam Milton Morgan & Matthew Wagers

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  1. Lauren Eby Clemens
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  2. Jessica Coon
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Correspondence to Maria Polinsky.

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We dedicate this paper to the memory of the Q’anjob’al community activist and artist Daniel Pedro Mateo (1969–2013), who was kidnapped and killed in Guatemala during the course of this work.

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Clemens, L.E., Coon, J., Mateo Pedro, P. et al. Ergativity and the complexity of extraction: a view from Mayan. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 33, 417–467 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9260-x

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