COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NOMINATIVE AND ERGATIVE SENTENCE STRUCTURES IN THE DAGESTAN LANGUAGES

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of ergative and nominative sentence constructions in the Dagestan languages, in which subject-object relations play a leading role in the formation of the structure of a simple sentence. In languages of the nominative system, the subject is expressed by the name in the nominative. With nominative constructions of the sentence, the transitivity of the verb-predicate contributes to a clear distinction between the subject and the object. With ergative constructions of the sentence, the role of the subject of the action is the name in the ergative. Proposals of nominative construction are classified into two types on the basis of transience and intransitivity. In the nominative construction, the verb-predicate of intransitive semantics is coordinated with the subject of the action, and the verb-predicate of transitional semantics is coordinated with the object of action. Ergative is a construction in which the name in the ergative acts as a subject.