The absence of an implicit object in unergatives: New and old evidence from Basque

Basque unergatives have long been held as evidence that unergative verbs have implicit objects. Recently, it has been shown that the presence of absolutive agreement-morphology in Basque is not a reliable indicator of a successful agreement relation with a nominal target. Building on this, I present two new arguments (and one old one) that Basque unergatives lack an implicit object. Since the subject of these verbs is nonetheless ergative-marked, these facts furnish an argument against a case-competition account of ergative case in Basque (i.e., against ergative being a dependent case). At first glance, this seems to favor an account of ergative as inherent case. However, previous work on Basque provides evidence against such an account; this evidence comes from raising-to-ergative constructions, and the existence of ergative-marked arguments that are unambiguously Themes. These facts therefore point to the need for a new theory of ergative case that is compatible (at the very least) with: (i) the existence of ergative noun-phrases without a case-competitor; (ii) the assignment of ergative case in non-thematic positions; and (iii) a lexically determined distinction between unergatives and unaccusatives. I conclude by discussing what such a theory of ergative case might look like.