Author: Falk, Yehuda N. Date: Dec 31 1998 Title: On Pivots and Subjects Email: msyfalk@mscc.huji.ac.il Remarks: This is a draft; comments eagerly awaited Abstract: It has occasionally been suggested in typologically-oriented work on ergative and Philippine-type languages that the grammatical function SUBJ should be factored into two separate grammatical functions: an argument function (which I call F^), and a discourse function "pivot" (PIV). The usual theoretical response has been to counter with a multistratal approach to SUBJhood. In this paper, I argue for the factoring of SUBJ into F^ and PIV. I show that the facts of syntactic ergativity follow from such a factoring.