Raul Aranovich: Linguistics History and Pervasiveness of Ergativity

My current project is an investigation in the history of linguistics. In particular, my project looks at the concept of “ergativity”, and how it emerged as a general concept out of disparate observations across language families. Ergativity is a phenomenon that fascinates linguists from the first time they come across it in graduate school and beyond. For those that do not know what ergativity is, it is an alignment system in which the objects of transitive verbs behave or are coded like the subjects of intransitive verbs. This is very different from the structure of the standard European languages (or classical languages like Latin and Ancient Greek), so the discipline underwent an epistemological readjustment once ergative languages became better known and described more widely.

In my research, I trace the discovery of ergative features in different language families from the earliest documents (including Indo-Aryan, Basque, Caucasian languages, Inuit, Chinookan and other Native American languages, Australian Aboriginal languages, Polynesian languages, Siberian languages, Mayan, Tibetan), and I also look at the debates surrounding some dead languages (Etruscan, Hurrian), and some intriguing claims about ergativity in Chinese. But the intended audience is not just the academic linguist. I frame my investigation as a case study in the history of the social sciences, and the philosophy of science, to provide historical context to the question of how scientific concepts are formed, the relationship between theory and observation, and the question of revolution vs. continuity in the development of a discipline. 

The research tells a story of discovery as well. The earlier observations tended to see ergative constructions as passives, bringing them into the mold of the more familiar Nominative-Accusative languages. But slowly different scholars started to suggest that their own object language may have something of an ergative structure. A first attempt at a synthesis came in the 1930’s within the Soviet school of linguistics of Nikolai Marr, but for political, linguistic, and academic reasons these views did not permeate Western linguistics. In the 1950’s, though, a British-Estonian professor of Russian named William Kleesman Matthews made these views available to the London-Cambridge linguistic community, and came up with what I claim is the first real synthesis. Matthews influenced Halliday and Dixon. Another pivotal figure was Jerzy Kuryłowicz, whose criticism of Marr’s Stadiality Thesis introduced ergativity to the Harvard-MIT community (Hale, Silverstein). In my work I make extensive use of archival material, correspondences, etc., and the usual historiographic methods.