Differential subject marking in Polish: The case of Genitive vs ...

which would be the patient of the corresponding active transitive. The agent of the verb in this case
occupies a peripheral position, being only secondarily connected with the state as the performer of the
action resulting in the state. Thus in the stative aspect (in contrast with the situation in all finite forms of
the verb referring to activity) ergativity is unmarked. When the stative form is used to make a predication,
the NP most closely connected with the verbal adjective will be in the unmarked case; if and when an
agent phrase comes to be attached to the stative of a transitive verb, it will be in some oblique case and
carry an overt marking. I propose that this is the origin of Type B ergativity: the incorporation into the
inflectional paradigm of a nominalized deverbal form with stative force. […] Since the verbal adjective is
a nominalized form, it quite often happens that the agent phrase (or what is later interpreted as an agent
phrase) is attached by means of a possessive construction, as seems to have been the case in Old Persian
and Old Armenian […]; a consequence of this is that the ergative case is often identical to the genitive,
dative or locative, the cases most often used to express possession” (Trask 1979:397f.).
5. Analysis
Returning now to question Q5 above, I think that there is indeed a deeper connection between the
GEN/NOM split in Polish and the ERG/ABS split of the Hindi kind. The key to understanding
both kinds of splits is the idea mentioned above that ergative structures are “stative” and that the
agent is often understood here as a “possessor” of a state. Let us make this idea more precise.
The situation (eventuality) denoted by the predicate in the Polish example (3a) is clearly
stative: the predicate describes the existence of an entity at a particular location. The nominal
argument is generated as the internal argument of the verb, i.e., it occupies the underlying direct
object position. This is in accordance with Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s “Existence Linking
Rule,” cited in (51) below:
(51) Existence Linking Rule (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995:153)
The argument of a verb whose existence is asserted or denied is its direct internal
argument.
However, unlike Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995), who assume that verbs of existence or
verbs of spatial configuration in their simple position meaning (see footnote 44) have two internal
arguments, a nominal argument and a locative argument (p. 82) (or unlike Hoekstra and Mulder
1990, who propose a small clause analysis: the NP and PP form a small clause, which is itself an
internal argument of the verb), I would like to propose that the locative phrase is generated in
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