1Ergative/Nominative Alternations in Manipuri Intransitive Constructions

This paper has the following objectives: • To develop the language internal tests to the distinctions of unergative and unaccusative intransitive constructions in Manipuri. • To establish that Manipuri does not have the category of adjectives and the semantic adjective equivalents in other languages like English have verbal morphology. • Manipuri intransitive constructions make clear distinction between individual level and stage level predications. • Finally, to show the case marking alternations on the subjects of intransitive constructions. 2 Unergative vs. unaccusative distinctions 2.1 The debate • Perlmutter (1978) formulated the Unaccusative Hypothesis (UH), which states that the subjects of unaccusatives share certain properties with direct objects of transitive predicates and the subjects of unergatives have non-derived subjects