ERGATIVITY

Etymology

Noun

ergativity (uncountable)

(linguistics) The property of a grammar's (or, by extension, a language's) being ergative; the attribute of possessing a grammatical pattern such that the object of a transitive verb is treated the same way as the subject of an intransitive one, while the subject of the transitive verb is treated differently.

Usage notes

• Writers distinguish between morphological and syntactic ergativity, based on how it is manifested. (In studied languages, syntactic ergativity has not been observed to exist in the absence of the morphological sort.) For more details, see

Coordinate terms

• accusativity

Source: Wiktionary



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Word of the Day

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CHATTEL

(noun) personal as opposed to real property; any tangible movable property (furniture or domestic animals or a car etc)


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Coffee Trivia

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