The Verb Alignment in Sargaĺk

Among the isolates that are geographically surrounded by Ćwarmin-Ŋʒädär we find Sargalk. It is spoken on a number of islands off the northern continental coast. The Sargalk subsist on fishing and hunting large marine mammals. It shows several typological similarities to the ĆŊ languages as well as to two other isolates in the region. However, lexically it has a number of tantalizing similarities to the Bryatesle-Dairwueh family.

One particular detail that attracts attention, however, is the "indirect ergative" structure of its alignment. Transitive as well as intransitive sentences follow the familiar nominative structure:

nen ood-as
I  sleep-1sg
I sleep

te ood-ar
you sleep-2sg

nen saĺp'a kin-es
I   meat eat-1sg
I eat meat

angas nev-ex sruk'-ju
walrus me-acc notice-3sg.perf.
the walrus spotted me

 However, the situation goes weird once ditransitives are introduced:

ne-tta te saĺp'a gʒup-s-an
I-"erg" you meat bring-1sg-[ergative marker]
I bring you meat

The "ergative case" is also used as a genitive case. In verb phrases with no object, but a recipient, the recipient is either marked with a postposition ('ete') or a dummy object is introduced ('ir', also the root of the inanimate indefinite pronoun). Two types of divergent dialects occur: on the two centralmost islands, it is permitted to omit either the subject or object (without change in marking), mark the verb with the ergative marker, and thus show that the nominative argument is the recipient (whereas the object and subject are marked with the accusative and ~ergative). The other type permits marking the recipient with either nominative or accusative. It seems speakers of the latter dialects prefer taking the case which the referent of the noun is less likely to be the other possible interpretation of - i.e. a noun that could likely be the object is marked with nominative, a noun that could likely be the subject is marked with the accusative.

If the ergative congruence marker on the verb is omitted, the person suffix should agree with the recipient. 

Further, a handful of verbs require the ergative for its subject even if they're intransitive. These include "build", dreĺiʒe and "survive", mak'ugu.

The voices interact unexpectedly with this: the recipient or the direct object can both be promoted to subjects of a passive transitive verb. The subject, the object and the indirect object can also all be demoted to adpositional phrases: k'ik for the subject, ete for the indirect object, and ʒva for the direct object. However, there is an antipassive of sorts that promotes the subject to the nominative case, and demotes the recipient to an oblique argument (again, marked with ete). 

Syntactically, the subject is a subject regardless of whether the verb agrees with it or the recipient with regards to gaps of this type. Thus, the following two examples have the same subjects for all verbs:

she-erg gave-3sg-ERG me a kiss and told-1sg a secret
she-erg gave-3sg-ERG me a kiss and told-3sg-ERG a secret

However,

she-erg gave-3sg-ERG me a kiss and told-1sg-ERG a secret

means that I told a secret, and presumably to her.

As can be inferred from the examples, the ergative marking often can be used to imply the presence of an implicit recipient.