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Although there is only one ergative language in Europe (Basque), perhaps one-quarter of the world's languages show ergative properties. R.M.W. Dixon here provides a full survey of the various types of ergativity, looking at the ways they interrelate, their semantic bases and their role in the organization of discourse. Comprehensive, clear, insightful, and illustrated by data from a wide variety of the world's languages, Ergativity will be the standard point of reference for all those interested in the topic.

Although there is only one ergative language in Europe (Basque), perhaps one-quarter of the world's languages show ergative properties. R.M.W. Dixon here provides a full survey of the various types of ergativity, looking at the ways they interrelate, their semantic bases and their role in the organization of discourse. Comprehensive, clear, insightful, and illustrated by data from a wide variety of the world's languages, Ergativity will be the standard point of reference for all those interested in the topic.

Yakan, a member of the Sama-Badjaw subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian family of Austronesian languages, is spoken by about 100,000 people on Basilan Island and nearby areas in the southern Philippines. It is a morphologically ergative language that displays a significant degree of syntactic ergativity. This is the first detailed description of its grammar. Chapter 1 presents a brief sociolinguistic description of the Yakan people. Chapter 2 describes the phonology of the language. Chapter 3 treats parts of speech. Chapter 4 presents an overview of noun phrases. Chapter 5 describes case marking. Chapter 6 discusses a unique feature of Yakan, the clitic-in which occurs on NPs and signals either definiteness or syntactic requiredness. Chapter 7 contains a comprehensive analysis of thirteen semantic verb classes and their affixes. Chapter 8 discusses verbal morphology, including the suffix-an which functions as a verb classifier, a valence increaser, and an indicator of partial affectedness. Chapter 9 describes nonverbal and verbal clause types. Chapter 10 reviews negation. Chapter 11 covers second-position clitics. Chapter 12, 13, and 14 present tense, aspect, and mood respectively. Chapter 15 discusses a range of syntactic processes, including promotion to direct object, passivization, antipassivization, equi-NP deletion, raising, relativization, clefting, reflexivization, reciprocal action, and a unique process in which the syntactic relation of oblique NPs is altered without involving full promotion to direct object. Chapter 16 treats complex sentences, including complement clause constructions, serial verb constructions, coordinate clause constructions, and subordinate clause constructions. Chapter 17 covers causative constructions. A narrative text illustrating some of these linguistic features is also included.