The ergative case is the grammatical case that identifies the subject of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages. In such languages, the ergative case is typically marked (most salient), while the absolutive case is unmarked. New work in case theory has vigorously supported the idea that the ergative case identifies the agent (intentful doer of action) of a verb (Woolford 2004). Furthermore, the agent has been shown to have a fixed location in which it is base-generated in the specifier of a light-verb projection within X-bar theory.

Georgian and other Caucasian languages use the ergative case

See also

• Morphosyntactic alignment

Reference

Woolford, Ellen. Lexical Case, Inherent Case, and Argument Structure. August 2004.

Grammatical cases

Ergativ | Ergativ | Caso ergativo | Ergativo | ergativo | 能格と絶対格 | Ergatiivi | Ergativus | Ergativ | 作格