EN
In spite of the scarce number of papers Coseriu dedicated to problems of functional syntax (Coseriu 1979, 1989), they fully agree with his general conception of semantics, especially grammatical semantics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt‘s notion of "interior linguistic shape". In this paper, Coseriu‘s principles of functional syntax are discussed with regard to publications on ergativity. It is argued that ergative languages are not, first of all, characterized by a specific case marking on nouns, but by a specific behavior of the verb and verbal categories such as voice. Phenomena of syntactical swift in Tupi-Guarani languages will also be described. First and second person pronominal objects in transitive verbal constructions are not allowed. Nominalized existential clauses are used instead.