Case Production in Ergative Languages
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Abstract:
Human language is full of variation in morphological marking and grammatical structures. All variations must be processed by brains with the same cognitive tools and abilities, but there is room for flexibility in the strategies that speakers/comprehenders recruit in order to efficiently manage the requirements of their specific language. Because cross-linguistic psycholinguistics has been an underdeveloped area of the field, there is limited understanding of what variability in processing strategies is possible, even for central language features such as case. This talk compares known production strategies for core case relationships in nominative languages to the production of three different ergative case languages: Shipibo-Konibo, Hindi, and Basque. The three ergative languages do not have a uniform planning profile, indicating that the presence of ergative case alone does not reliably imply a particular production strategy. Instead, the differences in production strategy follow from well-established formal and descriptive differences between the types of ergativity, providing a first approximation for the right level of 'granularity' of linguistic differences that correspond to processing differences.