Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Trask’s work is early in the rather extensive literature on ergativity (see Dixon 1994 for a
general treatment), but it does capture a basic distinction between ergative cases that
derive from the agentive adjunct of a passive verb and ergative cases that derive from
other, possessive postpositions, while the agent of the verb in question is either
impersonal or unexpressed. At a fairly rough level of description, Trask’s type B
ergativity explains the development of ergativity in Sumerian in that, as discussed in
chapter 1, one of the characteristic features of low source applicative constructions is that
they make use of possessor raising in the form of clausal possessive constructions in
which the possessor bears a dative or locative case and is also an argument of the verb.
Clearly such a configuration is very close to the one described by Trask and would be
ripe for grammaticalization as a ergative case.
While Trask’s model is descriptively adequate to a certain degree, a more precise
and detailed explanation can be formulated on the basis of Garrett’s discussion of the
development of ergative case-marking in Hittite (Garrett 1990). Like Trask, Garrett has
also argued that there are at least two primary ways in which ergative case-marking
develops in diachronic terms. Whereas Trask differentiated between obligatory
passivization (Type A) and the grammaticalization of adpositionally-marked possessors
(Type B), Garrett juxtaposes cases in which tense/aspect oppositions in conjunction with
passivization have yielded ergative case-marking (= Trask’s Type A), and cases in which
noun phrase animacy contrasts (known as “inherent lexical content of noun phrases,” in
Silverstein’s work) interacts with instrumental case-marking patterns in impersonal
causative constructions to produce ergative case-marking, a pattern that I will term “Type
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