Ergative Subjects *

The most striking feature of ergative systems is the fact that subjects of transitive and intransitive verbs behave differently for purposes of case and agreement. Why should this be so? One possible answer is that the transitivity of the verb directly affects how its subject behaves syntactically. That is, transitive and intransitive subjects have differing D-structure positions (Marantz 1984, B. Levin 1983), or conditions on case assignment force intransitive subjects to bear a particular case (Bobaljik 1993, Campana 1992, Chomsky 1993, Laka 1993, J. Levin & Massam 1985). 1 Alternatively, the differential behaviour of subjects is not directly determined by the transitivity of the verb: an independent syntactic requirement, such as the Extended Projection Principle (EPP, Chomsky 1982), causes subjects to behave differently in ergative systems. This paper argues for the second of these two possibilities. If the transitivity of the verb is directly responsible for the fact that transitive and intransitive subjects behave differently, then we expect th