rGyarong is a Tibeto-Burman language, spoken in northwestern
Sichuan Province, China. The language has long
attracted scholarly attention, because of the striking similarity
of some lexical items to Tibetan orthography, and owing to its
entangled morphological as well as morpho-syntactic processes.
In no previous study, however, has there been any clear-cut
description of the language's complexity. The verb morphology
and verb-related morpho-syntax, above all, show such a puzzling
structure that no earlier works on rGyarong seem to have provided
any convincing analyses.
I have already presented three papers on affixal matters;
in this paper, ergativity is discussed. To my understanding,
ergative is one of the transitivity structures in which the transitive
agent requires a (case) marker, while accusative structure is one
where the transitive patient is marked. The unmarked member
is regarded as being in the absolutive case, which is inserted at the
object position in ergative structure, and at the subject position
in accusative.
As Bauman [1975] pointed out, Tibeto-Burman has a variety
of morphological types of ergativity and their ways of appearance
vary from language to language. A very limited number of the
Tibeto-Burman languages are consistently ergative and many
others belong to the split-ergative type. This will be further
subclassified according to the degree of optionality and mixture
of case markers.
rGyarong is classified as being of the split-ergative type, but
because of the poverty of syntactic or textual data, Bauman's
argument on rGyarong is somewhat brief. This paper focusses
on how split and mixed it is in terms of ergativity, from the
historical perspective of Tibeto-Burman in general.
嘉戎語の能格性
KH_010_3_002.pdf
(1.33MB)
