Syntactic ergativity and the theory of subjecthood: Evidence from anaphor binding in West Circassian

Abstract:This article examines the role of subjecthood in the domain of anaphoric binding through the lens of West Circassian, a Northwest Caucasian language with ergative alignment. West Circassian reflexives and reciprocals display a puzzling mismatch in binding directionality with transitive ergative-absolutive predicates. Reflexives treat the ergative agent as the structurally higher argument, with the bound pronoun appearing in the position of the absolutive theme. A reciprocal pronoun, by contrast, appears in the ergative position and is bound by the absolutive theme, suggesting that the absolutive theme is structurally superior to the ergative agent. The article demonstrates that both anaphors are constrained in crosslinguistically familiar ways, but reflexives are subject to an additional licensing condition that limits the set of possible antecedents to the highest argument in the thematic domain. By demonstrating that structural superiority is domain-sensitive, the article challenges the significance of subjecthood as a grammatical primitive and argues that it should be replaced with a tree-geometrical notion of contextually determined prominence.