ABSTRACT

This paper and the next (Jelinek 1989b) are best taken as a pair. The paper in this chapter is primarily about the phenomenon of ergative/absolutive splits in Australian languages; the paper in the next chapter is about case splits in the completely unrelated language Choctaw. However, they both demonstrate the strength of the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis as a means of explaining the effects of hierarchies in split case-marking patterns.