Split Transitivity and Coreference in Katukina

After Scott DeLancey has, in the opening of this volume, straightened out some of the more frequent conceptual imbroglios concerning ergativity, I feel compelled to say a word on what this notion refers to in my own work. An ergative pattern is one in which core arguments of the basic transitive construction display a mapping between their semantic roles and their morphosyntactic properties such that the patient is formally ranked above the agent. "Basic " is to be understood in terms of semantic prototypicality, simpler formal definitory features, and higher frequency in discourse. "Formally ranked above " has two readings: 1) an argument is non-marked in terms of coding devices, i.e. it is coded in the same way as the sole argument of the basic intransitive construction; 2) an argument is privileged for accessing syntactic phenomena sensitive to some hierarchy of arguments, in much the same way as the sole argument of the basic intransitive construction. Thus, collapsing ergativity with passive is discarded because passive is neither basic nor transitive; with inverse because inverse is not basic; with (classical) split intransitivity because there is, in its case, no intransitive construction to be called more basic than the other. Whether or not one and the same argument captures properties 1) and 2) yields, respectively, homogenous ergativity (morphology and syntax) or heterogenous ergativity (only morphology)