Does Ergative Case Assigning Depend on Transitivity Condition in Georgian?

Abstract

The article presents empirical data on the dependency of case assigning on the transitivity condition in Georgian. Based on the original corpus material obtained during fieldwork in 2019, and following the theoretical assumptions of a dependent case theory originally proposed by Marantz (1991) and further developed in Baker (2015) and Baker & Bobaljik (2017), among others, the article outlines the empirical results validating the hypothesis that the transitivity condition is decisive for assigning the ergative case in Georgian. Further, problematic issues, like assigning the ergative to intransitive unergative verbs, are analysed and some strategies used by native-speaking consultants involving valency increasing operations are discussed.