Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes) [Hardcover]

Christopher D. Manning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1996 | ISBN-10: 1575860376 | ISBN-13: 978-1575860374

This volume considers and examines some of the phenomena that have led languages to be considered 'ergative'. Languages considered 'ergative' have only been sparsely studied, and many fundamental questions in their analysis seem at best incompletely answered. This volume fills that void by focusing on some of the basic issues: when ergativity should be analysed as syntactic or morphological; whether languages can be divided into two classes of syntactically and morphologically ergative languages, and if so where the division should be drawn; and whether ergative arguments are always core roles or not. Christopher Manning's codification of syntactic approaches to dealing with ergative languages is based on a hypothesis he terms the 'Inverse Grammatical Relations hypothesis'. This hypothesis adopts a framework that decouples prominence at the levels of grammatical relations and argument structure. The result is two notions of subject: grammatical subject and argument structure subject and a uniform analysis of syntactically ergative and Philippine languages. These language groups, the syntactically ergative and Philippine languages, allow an inverse mapping in the prominence of the two highest terms between argument structure and grammatical relations. This volume combines good scholarship with innovative ideas into an important work that will appeal to a wide range of linguists and scholars.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It has been a great pleasure reading Chris Manning's book. This is first of all because it is much more than just a reorganization of well-known facts in order to create a new description that can pose as a "theory." This book contains intriguing ideasm interesting theories, and new analyses, and they are clearly presented and for the most part well motivated. The author handles very complex and complicated data in a clear and instructive way, never allowing the overall perspective to be lost in minute details. I feel that this book will bring our understanding of different alignment phenomena a great step forward." Linguistic Typology

Language Notes

Text: English

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Inf (June 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575860376
• ISBN-13: 978-1575860374
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,892,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Manning is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford University. Manning has coauthored leading textbooks on statistical approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) (Manning and Schuetze 1999) and information retrieval (Manning, Raghavan, and Schuetze, 2008), as well as linguistic monographs on ergativity and complex predicates. His recent work concentrates on probabilistic approaches to NLP problems and computational semantics, particularly including such topics as statistical parsing, robust textual inference, machine translation, grammar induction, and large-scale joint inference for NLP. He has won several best paper awards, most recently his paper with Bill MacCartney on Natural Language Inference won the Coling 2008 Best Paper Award. Manning is from Australia and got his B.A. (Hons) at the Australian National University. His Ph.D. is from Stanford in 1995, and he held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Sydney before returning to Stanford.