n.
Pronunciation: ' ə r-g ə -tiv
Function: adjective
Etymology: Greek ergat ē s worker, from ergon work
Date: 1939
: of, relating to, or being a language (as Inuit or Georgian) in which the objects of transitive verbs and subjects of intransitive verbs are typically marked by the same linguistic forms also : being an inflectional morpheme that typically marks the subject of a transitive verb in an ergative language