McGregor, William B. - Ergative Marking of Intransitive Subjects in Warrwa

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Ergative Marking of Intransitive

Subjects in Warrwa
a
William B. McGregor
a
Aarhus University
Version of record first published: 28 Mar 2008
To cite this article: William B. McGregor (2007): Ergative Marking of Intransitive Subjects in
Warrwa, Australian Journal of Linguistics, 27:2, 201-229
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Australian Journal of Linguistics
Vol. 27, No. 2, October 2007, pp. 201 229
Ergative Marking of Intransitive

Subjects in Warrwa+
WILLIAM B. MCGREGOR
Aarhus University
Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 01:01 05 August 2012
As in a number of ergative languages, the ergative case-marker -na -ma in Warrwa is

occasionally found on the subject of intransitive clauses, indeed even on the subject of
verbless clauses. I argue that the presence vs. absence of the ergative marker in this
environment is not random free variation, but is motivated and highly constrained. The
paper is concerned with identifying the motivations. It is proposed, based on an
investigation of uses in a corpus of narrative and other texts, that two features are
relevant: (a) semantic*the subject is highly agentive; and (b) referential*the identity
of the subject is not predictable: it is unexpected. Use of the ergative on an intransitive
subject thus highlights both the agentivity and the unexpectedness of the subject. I argue
that, contrary to recent claims by some, Warrwa is not an active language: it is not
the case that -na -ma groups together some intransitive and transitive subjects, while
zero marking groups some intransitive subjects with transitive objects; these groupings
are, I argue, purely formal and epiphenomenal. Finally, I situate optional marking of
intransitive subjects in Warrwa in a wider theory of optional case marking.
Keywords: Ergativity; Optional Case Marking; Semantics of Grammar; Grammar and

Use; Warrwa
+
This is a revised version of a paper presented to the Australian Linguistic Society Conference, University of
Queensland, 7 July 2006. Thanks to the audience for useful questions, and to Jane Simpson and two anonymous
referees for comments on an earlier draft, which was written during a two month stay in the Department of
Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, July August 2006.
I am grateful to Andy Pawley for making me welcome in his department, and providing infrastructure support
for the duration of my stay. I am also grateful to Alec Coupe, Alice Gaby, Felicity Meakins, Carmel O’Shannessy,
Edgar Suter, and Jean-Christophe Verstraete for making unpublished work available to me, and for discussions
of optional ergative marking. The fieldwork on which this paper is based was funded by Australian Research
Council Large Grants A58930745 and A59332055. The initial research was undertaken during tenure of a
Research Fellowship at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1998; this was followed up by further research at the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Thanks are due to these organizations for their support.
My greatest debt of gratitude, of course, goes to my Warrwa teachers, Maudie Lennard and $Freddy Marker.
ISSN 0726-8602 print/ISSN 1469-2996 online/07/020201-29 # 2007 The Australian Linguistic Society
DOI: 10.1080/07268600701531351
202 W.B. McGregor
1. Introduction
All Nyulnyulan languages (O’Grady et al. 1966: 3536; Stokes & McGregor 2003) of
the Dampier Land peninsula and nearby parts of the Kimberley region of the far
north-west of Australia mark case relations by phrasal enclitics. These occur one per
NP, attached to its first word. Most of the languages have around 10 such enclitics,
including reflexes of proto-Nyulnyulan +-ni(ma) ERG (Stokes & McGregor 2003)
that normally mark the subject of a transitive clause, but not usually the subject of an
intransitive clause, which is typically morphologically unmarked, like the object of a
transitive clause. Warrwa, a moribund Eastern Nyulnyulan language (McGregor 1994;
Stokes & McGregor 2003), shows three reflexes of the proto-Nyulnyulan ergative.1
Two are the ordinary ergative allomorphs -na (which follows vowels and occasionally
liquids), and -ma (which can follow any consonant). The third is the focal ergative
marker -nma fERG [McGregor (2006) discusses this unusual morpheme]. Warrwa
examples (1) and (2) illustrate firstly the presence of an ergative enclitic on a
transitive subject, and secondly the absence of a case-marking enclitic on both
transitive objects and intransitive subjects.2
(1) yila-na kujuk ø-na-ng-ka-ny- ø warli

dog-ERG swallow 3.MIN.NOM-CM-EN-carry-PF-3.MIN.ACC meat
‘The dog swallowed the meat.’
(2) kinya wamba jawu-ngkaya ø-ngi-nda-n wila-n

this man swim-PROG 3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PRS water-LOC
‘This man is swimming in the water.’
Exceptions exist in all Nyulnyulan languages. First, transitive subjects are

occasionally not marked by the ergative enclitic. Speakers accept transitive clauses
with subject NPs either with or without the ergative marker, provided that the
referent is animate; moreover, they say both ‘mean the same’. However, investigation
of actual usage reveals that use of the ergative enclitic is not in free variation with
non-use, and subtle differences of meaning are discernible. I argue in McGregor
(2006) that non-use of the ergative marker on a transitive subject defocuses it,
indicating it is both low in agentivity and expected. By contrast, use of the ergative
1
A fourth reflex, -ni ERG, is almost certainly a recent occasional and unassimilated borrowing into Warrwa
from neighbouring and closely related Nyikina (McGregor 2006), where it represents the elsewhere allomorph of
the ergative.
2
Example sentences are laid out in accordance with the principles of the Leipzig Glossing Rules, using the
recommended abbreviations. Additional abbreviations employed in this paper are: AGT * agent; AUG *
augmented number; CM *conjugation marker; CR * connate role; EMP * emphatic; EN * epenthetic nasal;
FPT * far past; fERG *focal ergative; IV * inflecting verb; MIN * minimal number; PF * perfective; PR *
participant role; and SIM * simultaneous. The end of a tone unit is marked by a slash (/); and inflecting verb
roots are cited in capitals. Finally, enclitic boundaries are not distinguished as such, but indicated by the hyphen,
in the same way as other morpheme boundaries.
Ergative Marking of Intransitive Subjects in Warrwa 203
marker on a transitive subject NP conveys no additional meaning beyond that

conveyed by the marker itself: it is simply a transitive subject.
Second, intransitive subjects are very occasionally marked by the ergative enclitic.
This phenomenon appears to be virtually restricted to discourse, and is rarely
(though occasionally) found in elicitation. There is no reason to believe that use of
the ergative marker on intransitive subject NPs is a speech error, and speakers do not
hesitate or show any concurrent signs of uncertainty in their speech; nor do they
attempt to correct themselves either whilst narrating or later when transcribing texts
with the linguist. It turns out that distribution of the phenomenon is systematic,
though instances are few. A third set of exceptions is provided by subjects of verbless
clauses, which are also marked by the ergative enclitic, albeit very rarely*more rarely
than is the case for intransitive subjects.
Neither the second nor third phenomena has previously been investigated in
Warrwa; indeed, few comprehensive investigations have been undertaken of the
phenomenon in any language of Australia or from elsewhere. The present paper
focuses on the second question, and argues that use of the ergative marker on
intransitive subject NPs in Warrwa is not in free variation with its non-use. In this
environment use of the ergative marker is motivated, and conveys a meaning in
contrast with its non-use, which conveys no meaning. As in the case of occasional
omission of the ergative morpheme on some transitive subject NPs, two meaning
components are conveyed. One is a semantic feature: the referent is specified as highly
potent or agentive. The other is a referential feature: the identity of the subject is
singled out as contentious, a site for a degree of uncertainty*effectively it is in some
sense unexpected. Put in a slightly different way, attaching the ergative marker to an
Actor NP focalizes or highlights it.
The most significant claim of the paper is that these two meanings are, in Warrwa,
coded by the use of the ergative marker itself; it is not the case that the ergative
marker is used in response to discourse circumstances of high potency and
unexpectedness of the intransitive subject. This implies that meaning can be coded
by usage, and hence the theoretical implication that the boundary between semantics
and pragmatics does not lie at the boundary between (grammatical) system and use
(see further McGregor 2007b). This paper also attempts to contextualize the findings
for intransitive clauses in Warrwa in a broader framework, on the one hand by
relating optional ergative marking of intransitive subjects to optional ergative
marking of transitive subjects in Warrwa, and on the other with optional ergative
marking of intransitive subjects in other ergative languages.
This investigation is based on the same corpus as was used in the previous
investigation of optional ergative marking of Agent NPs in transitive clauses
(McGregor 2006). This consists primarily of some 60 texts, mostly narratives
(mythological, personal experience, etc.); these amount to almost 1,700 verbal
clauses. Also included in the corpus are seven text-sets making up some 1,400
sentences, elicited with visual prompts: Melissa Bowerman and Eric Pederson’s
Topological Relations Picture Series (Bowerman & Pederson nd); Men and Tree Photo
204 W.B. McGregor
Matching Games (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen); Mayer

(1969); Mayer and Mayer (1971); Eisenbeiss and McGregor (1999); Anon (1980); and
the Pear Story film. Somewhat over 5,000 sentences elicited by standard procedures
make up a secondary corpus.
Before we begin, it is important to note that Warrwa is a highly endangered
language, with a single surviving fluent speaker, and a few part speakers and/or
rememberers. I have undertaken approximately eight months fieldwork on the
language since 1994, working mainly with the surviving speaker, Maudie Lennard,
and to a lesser extent with her now deceased brother, Freddy Marker. Very little other
primary research has been done on the language.
2. Uses of Ergative Marker on Actor NPs in Warrwa Intransitive Clauses

Three fundamental types of verbal clause are identifiable in Warrwa, defined in terms
of normal case-marking of the inherent NPs, and the form of the cross-referencing
pronoun on the inflecting verb.3 These are, in order of increasing transitivity,
intransitive, middle,4 and transitive clauses. Example (3) shows formal characteriza-
tions of the three types.5
(3) Intransitive NP1 (PV) NOM1-IV

Middle NP1-ERG NP2-DAT (PV) NOM1-IV-OBL2
Transitive NP1-ERG NP2 (PV) NOM1-IV-ACC2
I have argued elsewhere that two tiers of grammatical roles should be identified for
Warrwa, and possibly universally (McGregor 1997, 2002a). One tier is made up of
participant roles (PRs), identified by (in Warrwa) the cross-referencing morphology
in the IV [i.e. ‘head marking’ in Nichols’ scheme (Nichols 1986)]. There are three
PRs: Actor (cross-referenced by a nominative prefix); Undergoer (cross-referenced by
3
As in many languages of northern Australia, Warrwa shows two distinct parts-of-speech corresponding to
verbs of familiar languages such as English, preverbs (PVs) and inflecting verbs (IVs). The former * exemplified
by kujuk ‘swallow’ and jawu ‘swim’ in examples (1) and (2) * admit no inflections, and the attachment of just a
few non-inflectional suffixes, such as the progressive as on jawu ‘swim’ in example (2). IVs, by contrast inflect
for verbal categories such as tense, mood, aspect, and person and number of the subject, as illustrated by the
inflected forms of the -KA ‘carry’ and -NDA ‘go’ verbs in examples (1) and (2). Most IVs have the potential for
independent occurrence in a verbal complex, in simple verb constructions, whereas PVs mostly occur in
compound verb constructions, in combination with inflecting verbs, which normally follow them (see further
McGregor 2002c).
4
The term ‘middle’ as used here follows usage in Jagst (1982: 46), Swartz (1982: 81 82), and McGregor (1990:
318, 2002a, 2004: 224 225), and is not to be confused with the traditional category of middle voice (Kemmer
1993). The term is appropriate since middle clauses show transitivity apparently intermediate between transitive
and intransitive (albeit closer to the transitive pole than is the traditional middle). Sometimes the term
semitransitive is used for clauses of this type; however, since I use this term for another clause type in Warrwa
involving two unmarked NPs (McGregor 2002a) I avoid its use here.
5
Two qualifications are in order. First, these are not the only emic clause types in Warrwa *there are at least
three other more minor types that need not concern us here (see McGregor 2002a). It is important to note,
however, that they are distinct construction types, and that middle clauses are not variants of transitive clauses
(see again McGregor 2002a).
an accusative enclitic); and Implicated (cross-referenced by an oblique enclitic). The

other tier consists of three connate roles (CRs), indicated by the morphological
marking of NPs (‘dependent marking’). Again three roles are distinguished: Agent
(denoted by an NP that is typically marked by the ergative postposition); Medium
(indicated by an unmarked NP); and Target (indicated by a DAT NP). All of these
roles are formally specified; they are not, however, purely formal relations: they also
have semantic content. For present purposes it is sufficient to say that the Actor
represents the performer of event, one who is engaged in it, while the Agent indicates
an entity directing activity towards an(other) entity bringing about some change in it.
The three fundamental clause types can now be characterized in terms of PR and
CR conflations and combinations, as follows (where the slash indicates conflation):
(4) PR CR PR CR
Intransitive Actor / Medium
Middle Actor / Agent Implicated / Target
Transitive Actor / Agent Undergoer / Medium
Figure 1 shows the token-frequencies of the ergative marker on Actors in in-

transitive clauses (henceforth Actor/Mediums) and Actor/Agents (henceforth Agents)
in middle and transitive clauses in the primary narrative corpus. Observe that just
under 10% of Agent NPs in transitive clauses are not ergatively marked*that is,
Figure 1 Token frequency of ergative marking of Actor NPs (‘subjects’) in the three
primary clause types in the Warrwa narrative corpus
206 W.B. McGregor
are represented by an unmarked NP*in all amounting to only about 1.5% of all
Agents (including those not represented by an overt NP). The frequency of ergatively
marked Actor NPs in intransitive clauses is approximately half of this, at about 4% of
all Actor NPs, and less than 1% of all Actors.
These statistics suggest that two things need explaining. One is the question this
paper addresses: why is the ergative marker sometimes used on an Actor/Medium?
On the other hand, its absence on an Actor/Medium NP apparently requires no
explanation*this is the usual situation. It is reasonable to suppose that presence of
the ergative marker on an Actor/Medium NP is a marked option, that may convey
meaning, whereas its absence is unmarked, and unlikely to express any meaning
nuance. The second is: given that there are nearly twice as many ellipsed Actor/
Medium NPs as present NPs, what motivates use of an NP in the first place? The
statistical difference here is far less striking than in our first case, and as likely as not it
is necessary to account for ellipsis as well as presence of the Actor/Medium NP*
especially if we look more widely at NP ellipsis. The answer to this question seems to
be that NPs are used when the referent is not predictable, and NPs are not used when
referent is predictable. More precisely, when an NP is used, the referent is specified as
unpredictable: new information is conveyed. By contrast, when no NP is used, the
referent is specified as predictable, and information is given or presumed.
As already mentioned, my claim*to be argued in this section*is that use of the
ergative enclitic on an Actor/Medium NP focalizes the referent, specifying on the one
hand that it is highly agentive or potent, and on the other that it is not expected.
The first semantic component, agentivity, concerns whether the referent is engaged in
a goal-directed activity, whether an action-vector is directed from it to something else
external to itself. It does not, in Warrwa, concern intentionality to perform the action,
or that the referent entity is the ultimate source of action, although both of these
features appear to be normally also present. Thus only animate Actor/Mediums are
attested with ergative marking; but the distribution of ergative marking does not
depend on high intentionality or even intentionality. On the other hand, the
component of transfer of energy (or something more abstract) from the Actor/
Medium to something else seems to be invariably present, as we will see shortly. The
second component is a referential one, concerning the predictability of the NP
referent: the ergative marker is used to single out the referent for particular attention,
its identity being in some way contentious or questionable. These two features, it
should be stressed, concern the speaker’s construal of the situation, not*or rather
only indirectly*the ‘reality’ of the referential world. We return to this point in
Section 2.3 below.
Sections 2.1 and 2.2 present evidence for the claims just outlined, drawing on the
entire corpus, including not just the narratives and the seven elicited text-sets, but
also the elicited sentences. Then in Section 2.3 we discuss some methodological
issues. The following section, Section 3, draws the various strands together, and
makes the theoretical point of the paper, namely that use of the ergative marker on an
Actor/Medium NP conveys a consistent meaning. An alternative pragmatic account is

outlined and shown to be inadequate.
2.1. High Potency or Agentivity

Although a clause may be formally intransitive, the Actor/Medium may be implicitly
or explicitly directing activity towards some distinct external entity, which it is their
intention to reach, or which in the speaker’s opinion will be reached. This
characteristic I refer to as high potency or agentivity, on the grounds that an
Actor/Medium displaying it can be reasonably regarded as more potent than usual
(see the discussion of Section 3.2 below for refinements). The proposed association
between ergative marking of Actor/Medium NPs and high potency is supported by
the fact that the formal marking is encountered in four main circumstances: (a) when
subsequent events involve directed action of the Actor/Medium targeted to some
goal; (b) in human cognitive or speech processes directed towards something; (c) in
processes of motion targeted to reaching (and probably with the expectation of
impacting on) an animate being; and (d) in reflexive actions impinging on something
else.6 We discuss these circumstances in sequence in the following subsections.
2.1.1. Event followed by a goal-targeted event

In this situation the clause is intransitive, but the Actor/Medium figures in
immediately subsequent events as a potent agent that impacts on another entity,
normally in either a transitive or middle clause. The presence of the ergative marker
on the Actor/Medium NP (as it were) presages the future agentivity of the referent;
ergative marking appears to be anticipatory.7 This has been referred to as ‘ergative
hopping’*see Haviland (1979: 154), who describes it for Guugu Yimidhirr (north
Queensland); McGregor (1979) for Ngaanyatjara; and McGregor (1992) for
Gooniyandi. This phenomenon is attested in the Warrwa corpus, though it is
rather rare in comparison with Gooniyandi. Examples (5) and (6) are among the
6
In identifying these circumstances I am not suggesting that Actor/Medium NPs in clauses describing other
types of events than these cannot be marked by the ergative. These are merely recurrent circumstances in which
marking is attested. In fact, I doubt whether there exist really strict restrictions on the event type, provided of
course that the feature of an agent vector is present.
7
The following example appears to show instead of anticipatory ergative marking, retentive ergative marking
from the previous transitive clause. However, as argued in McGregor (2007a), this is an instance of a distinct
mono-clausal complement construction, the transitivity of which is determined by the transitivity of the
complement.
ka-na-ngandi ø-ji-na/ kinya-na wuba/

1:NOM-CM-get 3.MIN.NOM-say-PST this-ERG little
‘The little one wanted to get her.’
One guesses that it might similarly be possible for expressions such as (5) and (6) involving motion verbs and
ergative hopping to grammaticalize into an associated motion construction. (I am grateful to Jane Simpson for
drawing this possibility to my attention.)
208 W.B. McGregor
few examples showing following transitive and middle clauses, respectively. (Recall
that in both transitive and middle clauses ergative marking of the Agent NP is
normal.)
(5) yiri-nma inyja ø-ngi-rnda-n baawa yaarr

woman-ERG walkabout 3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PRS child pull
ø-na-ng-ka-n- ø
3.MIN.NOM-CM-EN-carry-PRS-3.MIN.ACC
‘The woman is dragging the child along.’
(6) nyinka-na-wu/ linyju ø-ngi-rnda-na yawarda-warri::

this-ERG-EMP policeman 3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PST horse-COM

ø-bula-na-yirra/ jalu-an/ nyanki-ngany/
3.MIN.NOM-arrive-PST-3.AUG.OBL camp-LOC this:side-COM
jalu-an jirra/
camp-LOC their
‘The policeman went (towards them) on a horse, coming up to their camp on this side
of the billabong near Meda.’
2.1.2. Externally directed human behavioural processes

Perceptual and speech processes directed towards another entity, normally a human
being or higher order animate, are sometimes represented by an intransitive clause
with Actor/Medium NP marked by the ergative enclitic. Examples (7) and (8)
illustrate perception and speech respectively.
(7) nyin-ma baawa kanyjirr ø-ngira-n

this-ERG child look 3.MIN.NOM-become-PRS
bawurna/ marlu wi-l-yala Baalu/ marlu/
this:way not 3.MIN.NOM-IRR-see Tree not
‘The boy is looking this way; he can’t see the tree.’
(8) ngawayi/ ø-ji-na/ ngawayi ø-ji-na/ walawurru-na/ jiya/

yes 3.MIN.NOM-say-PST yes 3.MIN.NOM-say-PST eagle-ERG your
‘‘‘Yes, it’s yours’’ the eagle told him.’
The characteristic feature is that the cognitive process is aimed in a particular

direction, and indeed at a specific and implied though unmentioned entity,
normally a human, target. Thus in example (7) it is implicitly the speaker, while in
example (8) it is the addressee of the utterance, a crow (established already in this
mythological text as one of the main characters). For these examples we can
normally find an agnate middle clause in which the person/thing thought or spoken
to or about is represented, and cross-referenced by an oblique pronominal enclitic
to the verb, and with the Actor/Medium (perceiver or speaker) NP ergatively

marked.8
As another illustration, consider example (9), used to describe a drawing in which
a dog is depicted looking into a bee hive into which bees are flying (from Mayer
1969).
(9) jikiri ø-ja-n jimbin/ yila-ni jina/

peep 3.MIN.NOM-say-PRS inside dog-ERG his
‘His dog is peeping inside.’
2.1.3. Motion directed towards an animate being

Our third circumstance for ergative marking of Actor/Medium NPs is motion events
directed towards an animate individual, with the suggestion of subsequent interactive
engagement with that individual as an Undergoer. An example is (10) below. Here
both clauses are intransitive, and neither makes any explicit reference to another
being other than the Actor/Medium, the old woman. But very soon afterwards the
story goes on to relate how the old woman kills the young woman, her co-wife, and
buries her body. The old woman, that is, takes on a highly agentive role in the
episode, and indeed becomes its main protagonist.
(10) kinya-nkaw kaliya/ kinya-na marril-ma yiri kalaya/

this-ABL already this-ERG grey-ERG woman already
ø-ngi-rnda-na ngarnka-ngka i-nga-na/
3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PST speak-PROG 3.MIN.NOM-be-PST
‘Then the old woman went and was talking (to the young woman).’
2.1.4. Externally directed reflexives

Reflexives and reciprocals in Warrwa [as in other Nyulnyulan languages (McGregor
2000)] are represented by intransitive clauses, and the Actor/Medium NP does not
usually host a case-marking postposition. If the verbal construction is simple,
involving just an inflecting verb, this verb occurs in a distinct reflexive/reciprocal
form, marked by a derivational prefix and/or suffix; if the verbal construction is
complex, involving a preverb and inflecting verb, the latter is the specific reflexive/
reciprocal inflecting verb -BARNJI ‘exchange; do to oneself, do among one another’.
Example (11) illustrates ergative marking of the Actor/Medium of a reflexive/
reciprocal construction; this also denotes a directed human-behavioural process, and
thus could also have been dealt with under Section 2.1.2. See Section 3.2 below for
more on use of the fERG postposition -nma.
8
That clauses (7) and (8) are intransitive rather than middle follows from the fact that there is no oblique
pronominal enclitic on the IV (all oblique enclitic pronouns are non-zero in form). One additional piece of
evidence that these clauses are indeed distinct from the corresponding middle clauses is that the distribution of
the ergative marker on the subject is different: it is rare in the intransitive alternants, but usual in the middle
alternants.
210 W.B. McGregor
(11) babala-nma jina marlu-mirri kaliya kinya banbarra ø-barnji-na/

brother-fERG his not-EMP finish this tantrum 3.MIN.NOM-exchange-PST
‘The little one really threw a tantrum (over that girl).’
Example (12) illustrates the rare use of the ergative marker on an Actor/Medium in
a clause in which only the reciprocal interpretation is possible (the verb does not
admit the reflexive interpretation).
(12) yirra-na ø-ngi-rr-ma-nka-nyji-na-yanu

they-ERG 3NOM-NFUT-AUG-REF-hit-REF-PST-1MIN.OBL
‘They fought together for me.’
Example (13) provides a particularly clear illustration of this fourth circumstance.

It describes a drawing from Eisenbeiss and McGregor (1999) which depicts reflexive/
reciprocal activity by a dog (it is shaking water from itself) that impacts directly on a
girl standing next to it (she gets saturated by the water sprayed off).
(13) yila-nma dub-dub ø-barnji-n/

dog-fERG shake-shake 3.MIN.NOM-exchange-PRS
‘The dog is shaking itself.’
In each of the examples discussed in this section the situation is in a clear sense
directed externally: it impacts on some other entity, in these cases a human being.
2.2. Highlighting the Referent

Presence of the ergative postposition on an Actor/Medium indicates more than
potency: it also serves in addition to single out the referent of the NP for special
attention as being in some way unexpected and/or newsworthy: its identity is not
obvious, but is in some way contentious or questionable. This feature concerns the
informational status of the Actor/Medium: basically, it is not entirely predictable or
expected. Use of the ergative marker serves to assign focus to the Actor/Medium.
Evidence for this claim comes from examination of the two main circumstances in
which Actor/Medium NPs are marked by the ergative enclitic.
The first is where the NP represents the first mention of the referent in the text, and
thus is not predictable. An example is (10), from the story about the old woman who
murders her co-wife. This clause introduces the old woman into the narrative, and
represents the beginning of a new episode in which she is the protagonist, and the
most agentive character.
Not all ergative-marked Actor/Medium NPs are however new-mentions. For
instance, in example (13) the dog is not being introduced into the text for the first
time: it has already played a fairly prominent role in the story. However, there is a
switch from the boy as Actor in the previous clauses*and episode protagonist*to
the dog as Actor, albeit for only a short while. Similar remarks hold for example (9),
which comes from a recounting of the frog story (Mayer 1969), well after the first
introduction of the dog.
The background to the formal marking of Actor/Medium NPs in these two
circumstances lies in what I have elsewhere referred to as the Expected Actor Principle
(McGregor 2006: 402; see also McGregor 1998: 516), as per example (14).
(14) The episode protagonist is *once it has been established *the expected (and unmarked)
Actor of each foregrounded narrative clause of the episode; any other Actor is unexpected.
It is where an Actor/Medium is unexpected that formal marking can be, and

sometimes is, employed: formal marking is used when there is, so to say, a reason to
mark the NP as pragmatically salient. An Actor/Medium is highlighted when it is
unexpected. In the first circumstance we had the introduction of a new episode
protagonist (one that is also agentively potent); in the second case we had a
participant that for a short while showed itself as more potent than the protagonist.
Another circumstance in which an Actor/Medium is sometimes highlighted as
unpredictable is when an established participant set is divided into subsets, as in
example (15), where the two individuals concerned are separated, and the (identical)
action of each separately described in a clause. In contrast to the situation described
immediately above, what is relevant here is the local discourse domain, not the global
narrative domain (Verstraete forthcoming).
(15) burrb ø-ngi-rra-yi-na warany-ma burrb ø-ji-na

dance 3NOM-NFUT-AUG-say-PST other-ERG dance 3MIN.NOM-say-PST
warany-ma burrb ø-ji-na
other-ERG dance 3MIN.NOM-say-PST
‘They danced together; one danced with the other, the other danced with him.’
It should also be noted that this example also satisfies the agentivity claims
(Section 2.1): the point of splitting the group into two in this sentence is precisely to
underline the fact that the two individuals are dancing together in concert, each
interacting with the other, rather than each simply dancing. (This type of triclausal
construction, albeit with an intransitive verb in reflexive/reciprocal form, is
frequently used to highlight the interactive nature of reciprocal actions.)
2.3. Unmarked Actor/Medium NPs

I have argued the case for motivation in the use of the ergative marker on Actor/
Medium NPs via examination of instances of use of the marker in its environments of
occurrence. This investigation reveals some recurrent components of meaning that
can plausibly be associated with the use of the marker. These can be traced back to
general notions of agentivity and identity and are, of course, more schematic than the
212 W.B. McGregor
contextual features identifiable in particular instances of use of the marker: they lie
behind the instantiations, which serve as their contextualizations.
To complete the story one additional component is essential: we need to present
evidence that absence of the ergative enclitic on an Actor/Medium NP indicates
nothing in particular*that is, it neither indicates anything about the referent’s
agentivity nor about its degree of expectedness*as claimed above. This may be done
by demonstrating that in the same circumstances as where the ergative can be used on
Actor/Medium NPs, it need not be used: this would indicate that it can be used or not
used in any circumstance, regardless of the status of the Actor/Medium as an agent,
and regardless of its degree of expectedness. From this it could be concluded that
non-use of the ergative enclitic on an Actor/Medium NP conveys no meaning

whatever. It is beyond the scope of the present investigation to present a fully argued
case for this claim of semantic non-specificity associated with non-use. I content
myself with presenting a few suggestive examples.
Examination of the narrative corpus reveals few instances of unmarked Actor/
Medium NPs that clearly satisfy both conditions. In the overwhelming majority of
instances we find a non-agentive (or at best weakly agentive) Actor/Medium, one
that is not engaged in transferring significant action to something else. In most
cases where we have an apparently agentive Actor/Medium it is expected: its
identity is non-contentious. This is illustrated by example (16), in which the
barking owl is clearly directing a behavioural process to the eagle, and thus displays
high agentivity (as per Section 2.1.2). Here the identity of the Actor/Medium is
clear from the narrative context, and the final NP is apparently added as an
afterthought.
(16) walawurri-yi/ kudurr ø-ji-na kinya-yi wali/ minyjinyji/

eagle-DAT angry 3.MIN.NOM-say-PST this-DAT animal barking.owl
‘The barking owl got angry with the eagle.’
There are just a few possible exceptions, where an unmarked Actor/Medium NP

seems to denote a relatively highly agentive participant that is also unexpected*that
is, occurs in circumstances in which ergative marking is expected. The following
examples are amongst the clearest of these exceptions:
(17) yila kanyjirr ø-ngira-n/ jidlarra-kudany/

dog look 3.MIN.NOM-become-PRS descend-COM
‘The dog is looking downwards.’
(18) wanyji kujarra/ kurlukuku kujarra ø-ngi-rra-rnda-na-wili maliina

later two dove two 3.NOM-NFUT-AUG-go-PST-DU nothing
niyambala-minyjan karrba-ngkay/
foot-only look.for-PROG
‘Later, two doves went and looked for his tracks.’
(19) nyingka wanyji baabala jirra ø-ngi-rnda-na nyunu-ngana/

this later brother their 3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PST that.way-ALL
warrkam-kaya/
work-PROG
‘This one, their brother went that way (looking for them); he was a worker.’
(20) wayilwayil kurrak ø-ji-na/ ø-ngi-rnda-na

brown.snake go 3.MIN.NOM-say-PST 3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PST
ø-jala-na-ø kinya baawa/ baninyburi-yi baawa/
3.MIN.NOM-see-PST-3.MIN.ACC this child quiet.snake -DAT child
‘The brown snake went and looked at the quiet-snake’s children.’
Example (17), from Mayer 1969, is comparable with example (9) above in terms of
discourse environment and degree of agentivity of the Actor/Medium. Indeed, in this
part of the story not only are the dog and the other main participant in the story, the
boy (not mentioned in the clause), described as engaged in separate activities, but
also example (17) represents the first mention of the dog in the telling. Although it
could be suggested that the speaker is treating the dog in this instance as given and
predictable by the audience, this seems unlikely as the speaker consistently constructs
tellings from picture-books as though they are independent narratives, employing the
same strategies for participant introduction and reference. In any event, the textual
environment of example (17) is one in which an Actor/Medium NP could be*and
elsewhere is*treated as unexpected, and accorded ergative marking. As to its
agentivity, at best it might be suggested that in this instance the dog is less agentive
than in example (9), the target of the observation being a stream of water, rather than
bees. The same qualification might be entertained for examples (18) and (19), where
again the unmarked NPs serve to introduce the major participants into the narrative
discourse. However, in both of these instances it is clear that the ultimate intended
target is an animate being (the person followed, not their tracks; and the man’s
sisters), not an inanimate one. In example (20) we have a slightly different
circumstance*the speaker has just realized that she has confused the story, and
switched the roles to the brown snake and the quiet-snake; the identity of the Actor/
Medium might thus reasonably be held to be contentious or problematic at this point
in the narrative, and the syntactic environment is one where ergative ‘hopping’
(Section 2.1.1) is possible.
It thus appears that instances exist in which the conditions of high agentivity and
unexpectedness obtain, but the Actor/Medium NP is not marked by the ergative
enclitic. The meaning contrast would therefore seem to be between use of the ergative
postposition as a type of focal marker highlighting an agentive and unexpected Actor/
Medium, and its non-use, being consistent with any circumstance and signifying
nothing specific. Two important observations should be made at this point. First, it
must be stressed that it is not being claimed that one can tell from the discourse
circumstances whether or not ergative marking will be employed. Clearly the above
214 W.B. McGregor
discussion indicates that there is at best an unmarked correlation between the two; we
return to this point again below. Second, there is a discernible tendency for Actor/
Mediums that are both high in agentivity and unexpectedness to be marked by the
ergative postposition. This is, I submit, a consequence of pragmatic inferencing*
namely, that the speaker normally provides as much information as is required in the
circumstances, which will motivate use of the ergative when the referent is highly
potent and unexpected.
3. Theoretical and Typological Considerations

3.1. Meaning and Use of the Ergative Marker on Actor/Medium NPs

Evidence was presented in the previous section that a meaning is associated with the
presence of the ergative marker on Actor/Medium NPs in Warrwa intransitive
clauses. I argue in this section that use of the ergative marker encodes rather than
implicates this associated meaning. An important theoretical consequence that the
boundary between coded meaning [roughly ‘what is said’ (Grice 1989: 24)] and
implicated meaning (roughly ‘what is implicated’ or not said) does not coincide
with the boundary between sentences and utterances (usage), that is, between
sentence types and utterance tokens. Utterance meaning can be either semantic
(coded) or pragmatic (implicated); thus the distinction between semantics and
pragmatics does not lie at the boundary between sentences and utterances, as is
commonly presumed [see McGregor (2005, 2007b) for further discussion of this
point].
Let us begin by considering the possibility of a pragmatic explanation of ergative
marking of Actor/Mediums. One way this might be attempted is via the M-Principle
(Levinson 2000: 33)*cf. Grice’s maxim of manner: avoid obscurity and prolixity*
roughly: ‘What is said in an abnormal way, isn’t normal; or Marked message indicates
marked situation’. In other words a marked full expression invokes a marked non-
stereotypical interpretation, for instance that there is something unusual or
exceptional about it semantically; grossly, the more marked the form, the more
marked the meaning.
It seems reasonable, granted both its infrequency and phonological substance, to
regard an expression with ergative marked Actor/Medium NP as in some way
abnormal, a marked full form, a form not demanded by the grammar. Thus by the
M-Principle a marked, non-stereotypical, interpretation would be invoked. This
would most naturally be that the Actor/Medium is exceptional in some respect. Given
that the marking is by the ergative enclitic, it is reasonable to presume that the
exceptionality of the Actor/Medium lies in its agentivity, and therefore that it is more
agentive than would otherwise be expected.
So far so good. However, it seems to me that there are two serious problems with
this explanation. First, how can the highlighting component of meaning be accounted
for*how can the pragmatic explanation account for the observation that ergative
marked Actor/Mediums are always unexpected as well? It is not clear why a non-
stereotypical interpretation should simultaneously invoke information-focus on the
Actor/Medium. A focal Actor/Medium may be non-stereotypical (and thus marked),
but why should it be focality that is implicated by the M-Principle, rather than some
other commonly associated property of Actor/Medium NPs, say non-human or
inanimate? I doubt whether focal Actor/Mediums are significantly less frequent or
prototypical than inanimate ones in Warrwa (see further Section 3.3 below)*the
Actor/Medium role is, as is well known, the least semantically specified of the core
grammatical roles.
Second, why are high agentivity and unexpectedness invariably associated with an
ergative marked Actor/Medium? If this meaning were really implicated rather than
coded, it should be cancellable (Levinson 2000: 4254; McGregor 2005, 2007b), or at
least not invariably present. But this seems not to be the case: there is no evidence
that either sense is defeasible.
Admittedly token numbers are not large, and this might account for the absence of
examples showing cancellation of either or both meaning components. The second
consideration must be regarded as less telling than the first. Nevertheless, it does seem
reasonable to conclude that the meaning associated with the use of the ergative
enclitic on Actor/Medium NPs in Warrwa is consistent across all tokens; moreover, it
is not entirely predictable, and therefore must be encoded [see McGregor (2005,
2006) for a similar conclusion in relation to ergative non-marking in transitive
clauses].
3.2. Relation to Use of Ergative Marker in Transitive Clauses

The account of the presence of the ergative marker on Actor/Medium NPs put
forward in this paper is not an isolated phenomenon in itself. It bears similarities
with the situation for ergative marking of Agent NPs in transitive clauses. For one
thing, it will be recalled [see Section 1 and McGregor (2006)] that non-use of the
ergative marker on an Agent NP defocuses it, indicating it is low in agentivity, and
expected, while its use conveys no additional meaning. For another [as alluded to in
Section 1, and discussed in detail in McGregor (2006)], Warrwa possesses a special
focal ergative marker -nma, that assigns particular focus to the Agent of a transitive
clause, indicating it is high in agentivity and unexpected.
In each of these three circumstances the same two general meaning features are
applicable, agentivity and expectedness. At least in narratives, the feature of
expectedness relates consistently to the Expected Actor Principle. Agentivity seems
also to be roughly comparable, a crucial component of its meaning being the feature
‘impact on something external’. In transitive clauses, however, it seems that other
considerations also come into play (McGregor 2006: 400; see also Hopper &
Thompson 1980), presumably because high agentivity for an Actor/Medium need not
necessarily represent high agentivity for an Agent, where impingement on something
external comes for free.
216 W.B. McGregor
Granted the qualification that the scales for degree of agentivity differ depending on
clausal transitivity, Figure 2 provides a diagrammatic comparison of the three cases.
Not indicated in Figure 2(a) is that marking of Actor/Medium NPs by -nma fERG
is also possible, though very rare. A systematic study of the use of the ordinary
ergative markers -na and -ma vs. -nma fERG must await the compilation of a much
larger electronic corpus from the available resources. One guesses that either of two
scenarios will obtain: (a) the choice of -nma fERG conveys an even higher degree of
focus on the Actor/Medium than the ordinary ergative markers, perhaps signifying
contrastiveness; or (b) the contrast between -na -ma and -nma is neutralized in the
marked environment of Actor/Medium NP.
It is interesting to observe that, in terms of meaning, use of an ergative marker on

an Actor/Medium NP closely resembles the focal ergative marker on a transitive
Agent. This resemblance is underlined further by the observation that it is primarily
Figure 2 Morphological marking of Actor NPs in intransitive and transitive clauses in

Warrwa (Note that the scales of agentivity in the two cases are different, and the high
agentivity of intransitive Actors probably corresponds to any level of agentivity in a
transitive Agent, while low agentivity in (a) will be well below anything on the scale (b).
common animate NPs that receive the respective types of marking: personal
pronouns and inanimates, which lie at the extremes of Silverstein’s hierarchy
(Silverstein 1976), are not ergatively marked as Actor/Mediums, or marked by the
fERG as Agents. As suggested in McGregor (2006: 400), this may be because speech
event participants typically represent expected Actor/Mediums, and thus the identity
condition is not met, while inanimates typically fail on the agentivity condition.
We can now attempt to pin-point more precisely the loci of the two components of
meaning in each of our three cases. At the morphemic level we have, I would argue, a
consistent meaning associated with the ergative enclitic:
. ERG codes ‘agentive participant’*where agentive is interpreted, as per above, as a

feature of an entity impacting on another entity. This interprets, according to
grammatical context, as the most agentive Actor/Medium, and any (transitive)
Agent;
. fERG codes ‘highly agentive and highly unexpected’.
At the level of use of the ergative, we also have a semiotic system (McGregor 2005,
2006, 2007b):
. in a transitive clause, non-use of the ERG codes ‘an expected Agent that is also low
in agentivity’; use conveys nothing;
. in an intransitive clause, use of the ERG codes ‘an unexpected Actor/Medium’;
non-use conveys nothing.
Table 1 presents these facts more succinctly, and adds an extra dimension not
discussed here, the choice of using or not using an NP in the first place.
One further observation to be drawn from this story is that in a transitive clause,
absence of an ergative enclitic on the Agent NP is to be interpreted as an instance of
ellipsis, that is, as the presence of a zero signifying low agentivity and expectedness. In
Table 1 Types of realisations of Agent and Actor/Medium NPs and their meanings
Mode of realisation Associated meaning
All clause types

NP Entity
Ellipsis of NP Entity
expected (or given)
Intransitive clauses
No ERG enclitic [Actor/Medium]; no additional meaning
NP-ERG Actor/Medium high in agentivity
expected as Actor/Medium
Transitive clauses
No ERG enclitic low in agentivity
expected as Agent
NP-ERG [Agent]; no additional meaning
218 W.B. McGregor
intransitive clauses, absence of an ergative enclitic on the Actor NP is not to be

interpreted as ellipsis*there is nothing there at all: no substance, no form, no
meaning, and no zero. These two nothings of substance (in Hjelmslev’s terms), in
transitive and intransitive clauses respectively, correspond to different forms and
meanings, one being a sign, the other not(hing). These occur in just the right places:
the postulated zero is indeed a possible one, the nothing an impossible zero (see
further McGregor 2003).
3.3. Typological Perspective: Ergative Marking in Other Languages

Ergativity has enjoyed, since the late 1970s, a good deal of popularity in language
description, linguistic typology, and linguistic theory; it has been accorded
considerable prominence in the linguistic literature. A considerable amount of
attention has been paid to describing and accounting for the existence of split
ergative-accusative systems (e.g. Silverstein 1976, 1981; DeLancey 1981; Dixon 1979;
Malchukov 2005; Tsunoda 1981; Wierzbicka 1981), and to discourse motivations of
ergative alignment (e.g. Cooreman 1982; Du Bois 1987, 2003; O’Dowd 1990).
Systems of ‘optional’ ergative marking*in which ergative marking is not
determined by grammatical circumstances*have received far less attention, and
have enjoyed little prominence in linguistic theory and typology. This is
undoubtedly at least partly due to the fact that their investigation cannot usually
be effectively carried out at the sentence-level, and local and/or global discourse
considerations must be taken into account.9 There is mounting evidence that
systems of optional case-marking, both ergative and accusative, are not uncommon
in the world’s languages (e.g. McGregor 2005, 2007c), and that close study will
reveal important insights about human language, and the interaction between
grammar and discourse. There are encouraging signs that this topic is becoming
more prominent in the agendas of linguists (e.g. Dryer 1997; Gaby 2006a,
forthcoming; McGregor 1989, 1992, 1998, 2006; Schultze-Berndt 2006; Suter
1998, 2006; Tournadre 1996; Verstraete 2005, forthcoming).
Within the neglected field of optional ergative marking, the occasional and non-
obligatory ergative marking of intransitive Actor/Medium NPs is an even more
neglected domain.10 Nevertheless, it is attested in at least some intransitive
9
Of course, studies of discourse bases of ergative systems also take discourse phenomena into account. But
there is a crucial difference, I would argue, from the approach taken here. Studies of discourse motivation of
grammatical systems are concerned with motivations for existence of grammatical systems in earlier patterns of
usage, and thus typically fall into the domain of grammaticalization investigations. These studies are concerned
with the most global patterns of usage * basically, with what speakers do most frequently (e.g. Hopper 1987; Du
Bois 1987, 2003). Studies of optional case marking, by contrast, are concerned with nitty-gritty of actual
phenomena, with understanding of particular instances of use, and not just overall patterns. This means that
more sophisticated approaches to discourse are necessitated.
10
I retain the label Actor/Medium for the single inherent grammatical relation in intransitive clauses cross-
linguistically for terminological consistency, and because I presume both roles to be universal in the sense of
McGregor (1997: 99 100).
environments in a not insignificant number of languages, including those on the

following brief and very incomplete list:
Australian languages: non-Pama-Nyungan: other Nyulnyulan languages [e.g. Bardi,

Nyikina, Nyulnyul, Yawuru (McGregor 2004)]; Bunuba
(Rumsey 2000); Gooniyandi (McGregor 1990); Rembarrnga
(McKay 1975; Saulwick 2003); Pama-Nyungan: Guugu
Yimithirr (Haviland 1979); Ngaanjatjara (McGregor 1979);
Kuuk Thaayorre (Gaby 2004, 2006a,b: 169); the emergent
mixed language Gurindji Kriol (Meakins & O’Shannessy 2004)
Indo-Iranian: Hindi-Urdu (Enfield et al. 2004: 101); Manipuri (Bhat &
Ningomba 1997: 140); Marwari (Klaiman 1987:74)

Papuan languages: Eipo (Heeschen 1998); Enga (Li & Lang 1979: 321);
Folopa (Anderson & Wade 1988); Fore (Scott 1986: 172); Kâte
(Suter 2006); Korafe (Farr 1999); Ku Waru (Merlan & Rumsey 2001);
Siane (Potts & James 1988: 95, cited in Suter 2006); Skou
(Donohue 2002: 3); Tauya (MacDonald 1990: 317); Western
Dani (Donohue 2005)
Tibeto-Burman: Mongsen Ao (Coupe 2003, forthcoming); Tibetan (Saxena
nd; Tournadre 1991, 1996; Vollmann 2005); Sani Yi (LaPolla 1995: 215)
Caucasian: Tsova-Tush (Comrie 1978: 366 367; Merlan 1985: 340 341; Holisky
1987)
Language isolates: Basque (Tournadre 1996: 34)
Explanations for the use of the ergative marker on Actor/Medium NPs in

intransitive clauses, however, are almost always quite speculative, and are not backed
up by depth investigation of discourse instances in their context of occurrence.
Nevertheless, some trends are discernible in the speculations.
To begin with, perhaps the most commonly suggested motivation for use of the
ergative marker on Agent NPs in optional ergative languages is the discriminatory
function*effectively, the marker is used when there is a need to discriminate which
NP is serving in which grammatical role in the clause (e.g. Walsh 1976: 405; Dixon
1979: 73; Haiman 1979: 59; Foley 1986: 107108). This can hardly be a relevant
consideration in most instances of intransitive clauses, since being monovalent there
is normally no other NP that is a likely or even possible contender for the Actor/
Medium role [as is the case, for instance, with the first clauses of examples (5) and (6)
above].
Second, Du Bois’ well known ‘Given-A constraint’ (Du Bois 1987: 850), can hardly
be relevant. According to Du Bois (1987), Agent (his A) NPs are prototypically given
[in terms of their information status, on which see e.g. Grimes (1975), Chafe (1976)
and Halliday (1985)], and there is a strong cross-linguistic tendency to avoid new
Agents. To avoid this, there is, suggests Du Bois (1987: 830), a preference for
introducing human participants into narratives in the Actor/Medium role in
intransitive clauses. Du Bois (2003) and others have suggested that optional ergative
220 W.B. McGregor
marking can be accounted for by this constraint: the ergative marker will be used to
single out Agents that are new (cf. McGregor 1989). Given that the Medium role*
Actor in intransitive clauses and Undergoer in transitive clauses*is the primary site
for the introduction of new human participants [according to Du Bois, though see
McGregor (1998) for evidence that this is not so in Gooniyandi; and see O’Dowd
(1990) for evidence that it may be a peculiarity of narrative discourse], it seems
strange that unexpected (and therefore new) NPs should be specially marked
morphologically when they serve in one of the roles that is so to say made for them.
Du Bois’ approach does not offer an explanation for ergative marking of Actor/
Medium NPs.
Turning now to the proposals of this paper, the two factors identified for Warrwa,
agentivity and expectedness, appear to be relevant in some form or another, and
either separately or together, in at least some languages. Thus, for instance, I have
suggested both factors are relevant in not too geographically distant (though not
closely genetically related) Gooniyandi (McGregor 1998: 511), where the frequency of
ergative marking of Actor/Medium NPs is almost identical with their frequency in
Warrwa.
The agentivity of the Actor/Medium seems to be the primary consideration in some
languages. For example, Narasimhan and de Hoop suggest for Hindi-Urdu (Enfield et
al. 2004: 101) that ergative marking of Actor/Mediums indicates prominent or strong
agentivity or deliberateness. A similar situation appears to be relevant in Mongsen Ao,
according to Coupe (2003, forthcoming), who provides one of the very few detailed
discussions of the motivations of ergative marking of Actor/Mediums. Here the
Actor/Medium’s control and deliberateness in performing the event appears to be the
most salient consideration. Thus, example (21) contrasts with examples (22) and (23)
on the dimension of deliberateness; moreover, it seems that the inclusion of the
converb ‘deliberately’ guarantees the use of the ergative marker, as in example (22).
(21) nı` akh/3t Mongsen Ao

nı` akh/3t
1.SG cough.PST
‘I coughed.’ (Coupe forthcoming: 181)
(22) nı` n3 asak/3 akh/3t Mongsen Ao

nı` n3 asá c-/3k 3 akh/3t
1.SG ERG be.deliberate-SIM cough.PST
‘I deliberately coughed.’ (Coupe forthcoming: 181)
(23) nı` n/3 akh/3t Mongsen Ao

nı` n/3 akh/3t
1.SG AGT cough.PST
‘I coughed.’ (i.e., on purpose, to get your attention) (Coupe forthcoming: 182)
Somewhat strangely, in Mongsen Ao it seems that, except for intransitive clauses of

vocalization, intransitive clauses designating activities that are normally performed by
a volitional Actor/Medium do not allow for the possibility of optional ergative
marking (Coupe forthcoming: 186). Rather, it is in those intransitive clauses that
denote activities that are typically uncontrolled, but sometimes allow for deliberate
control by a human (e.g. coughing), that optional marking is possible. As this
suggests, the Actor/Medium NP in a clause of motion is not usually marked by the
ergative. However, if the speaker wishes to express the assertiveness of the Actor/
Medium, or that it was their personal choice to engage in the motion event, ergative
marking of the Actor/Medium NP is possible.
A somewhat similar situation in which agentivity*construed in terms of

volitionality, consciousness, and control*is the crucial feature motivating ergative
marking of Actor/Mediums in intransitive clauses seems to obtain in the Caucasian
language Tsova-Tush (Batsbi), as discussed in detail in Holisky (1987). Moreover, as
in Mongsen Ao, the picture is complicated by differences among intransitive clauses
according to the nature of the situation referred to. Some intransitive verbs disallow
optional ergative marking: in some instances ergative marking is impossible; in others
it is obligatory. A further complication is that for some verbs allowing optional
marking, non-marking is the norm, while for others marking is, and for still others
neither marking predominates. As Holisky concludes:
Tsova-Tush is, as reported, a language with an unusually close connection between

the semantics of agentivity and extended uses of an inherited ergative marking
pattern. It is not a simple relationship, however, where intransitive agents are
marked with the ergative and non-agents with nominative [i.e. are unmarked,
WMcG]. It is, rather, a complex one, which can only be understood with reference
to the role structures of intransitive predicates and to typical interpretations for the
participants in situations named by them (Holisky 1987: 122).
In Papuan languages such as Folopa (Anderson & Wade 1988: 6), Tauya
(MacDonald 1990: 317), and Fore (Scott 1986: 172), it seems that optional ergative
marking of Actor/Medium NPs is restricted to clauses where the Actor/Medium is
potentially agentive, and in control of the performance of the event. For other events
(like ‘die’), ergative marking is not an option.
What this brief discussion shows is that even though agentivity is a relevant
consideration, it is construed in different ways in different languages. Thus the
cognitive factors of deliberateness, control, assertiveness, and personal choice by the
Actor/Medium that are relevant in Mongsen Ao, and perhaps Tsova-Tush, Hindi-
Urdu and the three Papuan languages mentioned, appear to be irrelevant in Warrwa
and Gooniyandi, where it is the transfer of action or energy that emerges as the major
consideration. Interestingly, the cognitive factors just mentioned become relevant in
these two Australian languages in the case of transitive clauses, where they are
relevant to the degree of agentivity of the Agent.
222 W.B. McGregor
The notion of expectedness as used in this paper has to do ultimately with

information structure, the structuring of a stretch of speech so as to make it most
comprehensible to a hearer by highlighting those aspects that are least predictable,
and backgrounding that which is most predictable (McGregor 1997). The Expected
Actor Principle is one principle that a narrator makes use of in determining the
predictability or otherwise of an item of information*in this case, that a certain
entity is serving as an actor (and that the NP denoting it serves in the grammatical
role of Actor). This principle may or may not be utilized in other genres of Warrwa
texts or other discourse types*we simply do not know: the present investigation has
focussed on the best represented genre, narrative; few tokens of other genres are
available.
Suter (2006) suggests that the use of the ergative enclitic on Actor/Medium NPs in
Kâte is contrastive, and conveys nothing about its agentivity. Its function, that is, is
purely informational. This is clearly illustrated by example (24). It thus seems that the
highlighting function of the ergative on Actor/Mediums in Kâte is more significant
than in Warrwa, where contrastiveness is not implied. This is consistent with the
greater prominence assigned by the ergative marker to Agent NPs in transitive clauses
than is the case in Warrwa (where, it will be recalled, the use of the ergative conveys
no meaning beyond that which is conveyed as a part of the meaning of the morpheme
itself): as Suter (2006) suggests, Kâte -zi is a rhematic ergative case marker.11
(24) â australia-zi mâreE juwickec irec woraE fuE -ko Kâte

and Australians-ERG land down.there from.there mango base-LOC
kec irec hâmo-mbiE . Eic-zi amerika â australia
lo! from.there die-FPT.3.PL man-ERG Americans and Australians
hâmo-mbiE .
die-FPT.3.PL
‘The Australians died over there where you can see the mango tree. American and
Australian men died.’
A rather different proposal has been put forward by Saxena (nd) in relation to
ergative marking of Actor/Mediums in intransitive clauses in Lhasa Tibetan. She
suggests that the motivation also concerns discourse factors, but argues instead that it
is topicality rather than newness of information that is the relevant factor. The more
topical [in the sense of Givón (1979)] the subject is, the more likely it is to be
ergatively marked. Since topics are typically given, the motivation for optional
ergative marking of Actor/Medium NPs in Lhasa Tibetan would seem to be quite
contrary to the motivation in Warrwa and Kâte.
11
A further reflection of the dominance of the focal value of the Kâte ergative marker over agentivity is the rare,
but not impossible ergative marking of transitive objects, Undergoers, in the language (Suter 2006). By contrast,
I have found not a single instance of this phenomenon in Warrwa or any other Nyulnyulan or Bunuban
language, consistent with the fact that agentivity is a salient feature in the use of the ergative marker in these
languages.
The above observations lend further credence to the claim of Section 3.1 that the
highlighting function associated with the ergative enclitic on an Actor/Medium NP is
not a pragmatic inference: if it were, it would be expected that there would be a high
degree of cross-language correlation in the meaning associated with its use. This is
because the Gricean maxims and Levinsonian inferential heuristics apply specifically
to coded meaning (‘what is said’), which may reasonably be presumed to be
approximately identical for ergative markers cross-linguistically: ‘agent’. The M-
Principle should thus apply in roughly the same way in any language that admits this
exceptional usage of the ergative marker in intransitive clauses.
Finally, it is worthwhile drawing attention to the prospective function of ergative
marking of Actor/Mediums (see Section 2.1.1 above), whereby the ergative marker
appears to presage the subsequent agentivity of the Actor/Medium*that the present
Actor/Medium is soon to be an Agent. Aside from Australian languages such as
Warrwa, Gooniyandi, Ngaanjatjara, and Guugu Yimithirr, this appears to be a
motivating factor in Papuan languages Kâte and Siane (Potts & James 1988: 95, cited
in Suter 2006).
4. Conclusions
In this paper it has been argued that the occasional ergative marking of Actor/
Medium NPs in intransitive clauses in Warrwa is systematic. Optionality of ergative
marking should thus be read in the paradigmatic sense that use and non-use are both
grammatically permitted. The two possibilities are clearly not in free variation, and
the choice between them is meaningful*which is reminiscent of the well known
Hallidayan aphorism that meaning is choice.
More specifically it can be concluded that the ergative enclitic itself has an inherent
meaning that might reasonably be glossed ‘agent, agentive’, which marks the Actor/
Medium as potent, and capable of transferring energy to another entity. This inherent
meaning is also present in other uses of the enclitic, in particular where it marks an
Agent NP in a transitive clause; the difference is that in this case the grammatical role
of Agent itself shares the same core meaning*indicating redundancy in the system.
In addition to this, the use of the ergative enclitic also possesses an inherent meaning,
namely to highlight the Actor/Medium referent for particular attention, since it is
unexpected. This provides additional support for an earlier claim by McGregor (1998,
2003, 2005, 2006) that not just morphemes but also their usage and non-usage may
constitute semiotic systems. The existence of such usage-based semantic systems of
coded meaning, while generally overlooked in linguistics, is hardly an unexpected
phenomenon for our obsessively symbolic species. In everyday life, for instance, we
use things in various ways to convey meanings that are not conveyed by objects
themselves*for instance a flag, which might symbolize a particular country, can be
used in different ways, some of which convey conventionalized meanings (e.g.
displaying in a particular way as expression of patriotism, flying upside-down to
indicate death of an important individual, burning as expression of an anti-state
224 W.B. McGregor
sentiment). In conversational interactions, people may use or not use talk to convey a
conventional meaning. Many linguistic zeros are also instances of non-use that
contrast semantically with instances of use of a form (McGregor 2003).
The two components of meaning identified in this paper are not limited to a single
phenomenon in a single language, but appear to be relevant elsewhere in Warrwa and
in other languages. Significantly, these meanings are not identical, but related. The
coherence of the evidently related phenomena lends credence to the present
proposals. I suspect furthermore that both factors will turn out to be relevant to
the explanation of the occasional ergative marking on subjects of verbless clauses in
Warrwa (as adumbrated in Section 1). Consider example (25), which was used in
describing the motion of two cars.
(25) warany-ma karnkanu warany-ma nyinkanu kinya-n-jangarri

other-ERG from.there other-ERG from.this.way this-LOC-EMP
‘One from this way, the other from that way.’
The contrastive function of the ergative marker is evident here. It is also not
implausible to attribute an agentivity meaning to the example: the cars subsequently
crashed into one another.
Despite Warrwa’s advanced situation of obsolescence, the two last speakers
evidently share the same system of ergative marking for both transitive Agent NPs
[as argued in detail in McGregor (2006)] and Actor/Medium NPs (as argued in this
paper): the same morphemes with identical allomorphic conditioning and the same
inherent values, and identical uses/non-uses. Granted this, and the systemic
comparability with the nearby non-Nyulnyulan language Gooniyandi, it seems
reasonable to hypothesize that the contemporary system is isomorphic with the
system of Warrwa in the recent past, when it was a more viable language.12 This adds
further support to the resilience of ergative morphology in language endangerment
situations (as observed by e.g. Schmidt 1985; Dalton et al. 1995; McGregor 2002b). It
also shows that systems of optional ergative marking can be remarkably stable, and
need not shift rapidly towards what some scholars regard as the norm for ergative
systems: systems in which the ergative is conditioned by purely grammatical features.
Indeed, it seems that obligatorification may well be a gradual process (McGregor
forthcoming). Interestingly, it seems that this type of change is not unidirectional:
there are well attested cases of deobligatorification, for instance in the case of the
mixed languages Gurindji Kriol and Light Warlpiri, in which the ergative marker is
optional, whereas in the traditional languages Gurindji and Warlpiri it is not
(Meakins & O’Shannessy 2004).
The occasional presence of the ergative marker on Actor/Medium NPs in
Nyulnyulan languages generally, as well as its somewhat more frequent absence
12
There is no reason to believe that the last two Warrwa speakers have innovated a new system (or new systems)
of ergative case marking (cf. Pensalfini 1999). The available evidence points unequivocally to the conclusion that
the system of optional ergative marking was a part of the traditional language, shared with other Nyulnyulan and
nearby languages.
from Agent NPs, has led some linguists (e.g. Dixon 2002: 133) to the view that
Nyulnyulan languages are not morphologically ergative*that they are, instead, active
languages like Acehnese (Durie 1988), Guaranı́ (Velázquez-Castillo 2002), and some
North American and Caucasian languages. The arguments of this paper reveal clearly
that similarities with active systems are spurious. Aside from the reasons laid out in
McGregor (2005), the crux of the matter is that the presence vs. absence of the
ergative marker in transitive clauses does not parallel its presence vs. absence in
intransitive clauses (as can be seen at a glance from Figure 2). There is, that is, no
language-internal basis for grouping ergatively marked transitive Agents together
with ergatively marked Actor/Mediums in contrast with ergatively unmarked Agents
and Actor/Mediums on the other. Such groupings have a purely formal basis and are
not supported by any deeper semantic (or grammatical) correlations. By contrast, in
active languages the grouping of some intransitive Actors with Agents is significant,
and motivated: the identical morphological marking is motivated by the same
considerations. The label ‘active’ is thus far more misleading than ‘ergative’ for
Nyulnyulan languages; these languages are much closer to the ergative prototype than
to the prototypical active system. To exclude these languages from the class of ergative
languages would arbitrarily delimit the domain of ergative marking, and result in a
deficient typology of ergative marking.
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McGregor, William B. - Ergative Marking of Intransitive Subjects in Warrwa

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Ergative Marking of Intransitive

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Ergative Marking of Intransitive

As in a number of ergative languages, the ergative case-marker -na -ma in Warrwa is

Keywords: Ergativity; Optional Case Marking; Semantics of Grammar; Grammar and

(1) yila-na kujuk ø-na-ng-ka-ny- ø warli

(2) kinya wamba jawu-ngkaya ø-ngi-nda-n wila-n

Exceptions exist in all Nyulnyulan languages. First, transitive subjects are

marker on a transitive subject NP conveys no additional meaning beyond that

Matching Games (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen); Mayer

2. Uses of Ergative Marker on Actor NPs in Warrwa Intransitive Clauses

(3) Intransitive NP1 (PV) NOM1-IV

an accusative enclitic); and Implicated (cross-referenced by an oblique enclitic). The

CR conflations and combinations, as follows (where the slash indicates conflation):

Figure 1 shows the token-frequencies of the ergative marker on Actors in in-

Actor/Medium NP conveys a consistent meaning. An alternative pragmatic account is

2.1. High Potency or Agentivity

2.1.1. Event followed by a goal-targeted event

ka-na-ngandi ø-ji-na/ kinya-na wuba/

(5) yiri-nma inyja ø-ngi-rnda-n baawa yaarr

(6) nyinka-na-wu/ linyju ø-ngi-rnda-na yawarda-warri::

this-ERG-EMP policeman 3.MIN.NOM-NFUT-go-PST horse-COM

2.1.2. Externally directed human behavioural processes

(7) nyin-ma baawa kanyjirr ø-ngira-n

(8) ngawayi/ ø-ji-na/ ngawayi ø-ji-na/ walawurru-na/ jiya/

The characteristic feature is that the cognitive process is aimed in a particular

to the verb, and with the Actor/Medium (perceiver or speaker) NP ergatively

(9) jikiri ø-ja-n jimbin/ yila-ni jina/

2.1.3. Motion directed towards an animate being

(10) kinya-nkaw kaliya/ kinya-na marril-ma yiri kalaya/

2.1.4. Externally directed reflexives

(11) babala-nma jina marlu-mirri kaliya kinya banbarra ø-barnji-na/

(12) yirra-na ø-ngi-rr-ma-nka-nyji-na-yanu

Example (13) provides a particularly clear illustration of this fourth circumstance.

(13) yila-nma dub-dub ø-barnji-n/

2.2. Highlighting the Referent

It is where an Actor/Medium is unexpected that formal marking can be, and

(15) burrb ø-ngi-rra-yi-na warany-ma burrb ø-ji-na

2.3. Unmarked Actor/Medium NPs

non-use of the ergative enclitic on an Actor/Medium NP conveys no meaning

(16) walawurri-yi/ kudurr ø-ji-na kinya-yi wali/ minyjinyji/

There are just a few possible exceptions, where an unmarked Actor/Medium NP

(17) yila kanyjirr ø-ngira-n/ jidlarra-kudany/

(18) wanyji kujarra/ kurlukuku kujarra ø-ngi-rra-rnda-na-wili maliina

(19) nyingka wanyji baabala jirra ø-ngi-rnda-na nyunu-ngana/

(20) wayilwayil kurrak ø-ji-na/ ø-ngi-rnda-na

3. Theoretical and Typological Considerations

3.1. Meaning and Use of the Ergative Marker on Actor/Medium NPs

3.2. Relation to Use of Ergative Marker in Transitive Clauses

It is interesting to observe that, in terms of meaning, use of an ergative marker on

Figure 2 Morphological marking of Actor NPs in intransitive and transitive clauses in

. ERG codes ‘agentive participant’*where agentive is interpreted, as per above, as a

All clause types

intransitive clauses, absence of an ergative enclitic on the Actor NP is not to be

3.3. Typological Perspective: Ergative Marking in Other Languages

environments in a not insignificant number of languages, including those on the