The marked status of ergativity

Ergative patterns are encountered in only a quarter of the world’s languages. Often, the absolutive-ergative pattern co-occurs with a nominative-accusative pattern. Moreover, ergativity is not deeply rooted in the syntax of most languages. In this paper, I develop a theory that explains why ergativity is a marked phenomenon. The main hypothesis is that argument structure has a universal nominative-accusative basis. Two sub-hypotheses, called the Second Pattern Hypothesis (SPH) and the Ergative as Passive Hypothesis (EPH), derive ergativity. Both of them treat the ergative NP as an adjunct that doubles a pronominal argument. The ergative case is lexical rather than structural.